


Come On, Get Higher

by sidneybelveire



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 57289, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bros Being Bros Being Gay, Earth-57289, Everyone else is amused, M/M, Mutual Pining, Natasha Is a Good Bro, POV Alternating, Rhodey Is Iron Man? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP, Rhodey is the best, That good shit (tm), Tony's Life Is Hard, We will fix the canon, anyway the sam/steve is there if you squint but not a main ship, eventually this thing will have art, i lied about the angst content i'm sorry, i'll have a post-fic-completion thingy to make up for it, in this house we love and respect black panther, most of the characters are in the background instead of POV, not very sorry but a lil bit, the winter soldier doesn't show up here, with hammer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2018-12-21 01:09:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 37,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11933184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidneybelveire/pseuds/sidneybelveire
Summary: In Earth-57289, a briefly glimpsed alternative universe of Marvel 616, Dr. James Rhodes, also known by his Avengers moniker of Iron Man, is the prodigal son turned head of Rhodes Labs International, the most powerful technology and design private-sector company on the planet. He's beloved by many as a hero in more ways than one, having made the decision to stop weapons production in favor of aid-based innovation.In Earth-57289, Anthony (Stark) Jarvis is one of RLI's best scientists and innovators, despite being a recovering alcoholic vet with PSTD and no degree or acclaim to speak of. He isn't homeless yet, although he spends most of his time in a modified science lab in the basement of RLI's department of R&D, so he might as well be. (He does go back to his apartment to feed his fish.)In Earth-57289, as in most universes, they're kind of in love with each other. Just a bit. It's not a big deal, it's not like Tony hoards newspaper clippings about his superior to scrapbook into collages or Rhodey thinks of Tony's lab as the one place he doesn't wear a mask. It's fine.Natasha Romanov (with her trusty minion army) intends to change that, goddamn it, because this is getting ridiculous.





	1. in which we meet a robot shaped like a dinosaur and a man who would really like a drink and won’t be having one.

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, so y'know how there was a panel in a Marvel comic where in an alternate universe Rhodey is the mega scientist running a big company and Tony is a scientist employed by said company? 
> 
> And people on the internet were like, damn that's some heart eyes Tony has going on for his boss, can we photoshop some hearts and sparkles on that, and lo and behold they did?
> 
> And people wrote some pieces of fic in that vein?
> 
> Yeah, so here's more of that universe.

Now that the Wakanda delegation’s visit to the main lab branch is finally over, Tony can relax in his hiding spot of choice and not have to put on the dreaded Straight Jacket Of Science or pretend like he’s a person who shaves regularly enough. Hey, if Dr. Banner “call me Bruce” (over in what Tony definitely doesn’t call The Void instead of the pretentious acronym “VIO”) can get away with perpetual 5 o’clock shadow and constant absent-minded professor clothing, Tony doesn’t see why a low-level lab goon in R&D has to conform to some dress code that no one else gets scolded for breaking.  
  
It’s probably that Banner is such great friends with the man of the hour, Tony thinks. He starts taking off his shoes and socks now that he’s locked the door to what is usually labeled the Frankenlab but which he definitely doesn’t think of as his Fortress of Solitude. Banner’s like, a super-genius, too. It makes sense he’d be BFFs with the Man Behind the Iron Mask. Even if everyone is pretty hush-hush about the Big Green Elephant in the room, Rhodes would be the kind of guy to not give a single hydroplaning fuck unless his credentials were fake or something.  
  
But Banner’s a humanitarian and the sun shines out of his ass or whatever, so. Head of Visualization, Implementation & Outreach. BFFs with the best scientific mind in existence. Allowed to experiment with dangerous substances without a permit in triplicate. Tony kicks a shoe away from him, feeling petulant about everything to ever exist.  
  
Dino-bot clacks over to chirp at him fussily and move his shoes to the shoe rack that Dr. Ho had finally written off as a necessary evil. Tony whistles back a quick apology in binary to placate her, and she reaches out for his tie and lab coat, undeterred in her mission to keep the entryway tidy in the face of his need to be free of constraining folderol. Dino grabs for his pants next, but he moves her metal raptor-like claws away and she shrieks angrily, stamping her feet.  
  
“I’m not done with those yet, calm down and don’t grab my junk or I will reprogram you to be a glorified coatrack, see if I don’t,” he says over her complaints. The other bots all making a few clicking noises in the background, their equivalent of an “ooooohhh” jeer. Even the supposedly not sentient overhead light gets in on it, which is new and also uncalled for. Dino reaches out again once the pants are off, exaggeratedly careful, but he stops her with a glare.  
  
“Hey, hey. We have a deal, buster. Where are my sweatpants? What’s the deal if you want these pants, did you forget?” Dino trudges off begrudgingly to retrieve a set of lab-spill-friendly pants from wherever it is that she hoards his clothing. She’s supposed to pick up his stuff and put it in his locker, but for whatever reason, she’s decided that it should be impossible to find, instead. Probably building a nest out of it, the little weirdo.  
  
(Tony loves her dearly, and he idly wonders if she’d prefer socks to ties—he accidentally ordered the wrong size for some boot mechanism tests he was running, and the unopened package is in the mess of a closet back at his place.)  
  
The other bots are happily getting tools and arranging the furniture for him like the good mechanoids they should be, chirping and whistling to each other instead of at him.  
  
His legs have already brought him halfway to his holographic schematic table in the glass center room, and his brain is light years ahead of that, when he hears the knocking on the outermost lab door. He mentally considers the likelihood of Natalie coming by to hide and/or drink in his Batcave because his bots are far cooler than her secretarial work, against the likelihood of Dr. Ho coming to drag him away for boring and stupid paperwork, against the off chance of a hapless intern or tech needing him to fix the latest calamity. He’d factor in Agent Phil, but Phil’s off duty for another month or so from whatever shadow organization he’s with.  
  
(It’s SHIELD, he’s pretty sure, Phil’s bumbling suit trick for the higher ups has Aunt Peg written all over it. He hopes Peggy nerded out with him about Captain America at some point, they’d make a good pair of dorks.)  
  
Nat only knocks because she’s polite, but will bust her way in if denied entry like the terrifying totally-just-a-hot-secretary-and-not-a-Russian-spy she is because she figured out the algorithm he uses to encrypt the door code. He doesn’t need to get up if it’s her, he can just yell that vodka doesn’t belong in his house of scientific reason and she’ll ignore him to bitch about Banner being attractive (true) and a hard-ass (less true), and attempt to strong arm Tony into a reasonable work day timeframe for his own good (the least true). Business as usual.  
  
Dr. Ho would just text him because Yinsen, bless his brightly colored bow-ties, hasn’t figured out the keypad is a decoy, or that Tony has installed a modified all-tech Farraday frame around the lab here that he can activate verbally. (Possibly Dr. Ho just doesn’t care enough to investigate, but Tony likes to entertain the delusion of being sneaky.) If it is his boss’ boss, he can just pretend to be working and deflect paperwork to a later point. He’ll have enough time; the glass of the cube turns into a one-way mirror whenever Tony enters. Still no need to get up. Tony spins on his stool and pulls up some harmless tinkering to-do projects just in case.  
  
If the techs need him to intervene—wait, they’re probably off getting drunk in the fancy courtyard cafeteria area that Tony would never dream of calling Rat Park, since everyone’s been going way too hard for this Wakanda visit (Princess Shuri’s work with vibranium is basically the coolest thing this century, Tony 100% gets the all-nighters and the hype.) So if it is a lowly peon breaking things, they can fuck off to get wasted like the rest of the R&D crew, because that is tomorrow’s problem. The lab is fire, water, chemical, and Hulk-proof, anyway.  
  
Clearly Tony has no need to get up, regardless. Life is good like that, except for how no one in R&D would let him ask questions or get within five feet of the delegation or Her Majesty because he is the resident crazy man who can’t be trusted not to incoherently gibber instead of proposing a minor tweak to a seam inlay design, or something. Assholes.

So he absently yells out to whomever it is to enter at their own risk, and makes a note on one diagram to see if he can’t find a delegate’s email to send his alternate-track delaying charge coil idea to someone over in the Wakandan labs. He barely hears the glass door slide open, but there’s no Yinsen-cane squeaking so he’s fine.

“Nat, no vodka in my lab, we have been over this, what, how many times?” he says, expanding the note to doodle a little coil track for reference.

“Probably a lot, she’s a real tank with that blueberry stuff in particular,” says James Fucking Rhodes, owner and head of Rhodes Labs International, best scientific research company in the private sector for over a decade. “Pepper thinks she compacts it in a second gut that all Russians have.”

Tony makes some sort of noise which he desperately hopes has a passing relation to dignity and collected-ness. It probably sounds more like a frog being choked down by a pelican.

“Not that I’d mind if there was some stronger stuff around,” says James “World’s Hottest Dreamboat Forbes Lister under 40” (as voted by 3 separate tabloids that Tony does not have hidden under the fishtank aquarium in his dingy apartment) Rhodes, who is now leaning against Tony’s hologram table, smiling broadly at him, and removing his own very fancy (is that watercolor silk? It’s a really nice color on him) tie. “It’s been a hell of a week, huh?”

Tony figures the best thing now is that an asteroid can just come and obliterate him and all of his life’s work. It’ll be better that way. James “Impossibly Brilliant Scientist” Rhodes, who is now rolling up his sleeves and looking at his watch, will survive because he is Iron Man even without the suit and therefore amazing and too cool to share in Tony’s messy end at the hands of cruel fate.

Tony jerks his thumb and says, in lieu of recalcitrant asteroids that will not save him from this torment, “Don’t tell the guy who vouched for me to get this job or anything, but there’s some cheap airplane gin and a bottle of tonic water in the fire extinguisher box behind the instruction panel.”

James Rhodes, who is perfect, laughs as if Tony is funny and not a hideous monstrosity in the eyes of divinity and more importantly the scientific community, and shakes his head while still smiling. Dino has wandered up at some point and is receiving head pats, the traitor. Tony tries not to stare at the calluses on James Rhodes’s fingers, and pretends to be glaring at Dino. Dino is unrepentant and smug.

“Nah, man, no snitching. Your secret’s safe with me.” He winks confidentially, and Tony has lost track of what they were talking about. He mentally debates his personal “no video or recorded surveillance of me, ever, on job or off, or I walk and get 1.75million in exit pay” rule because he is sure his memory will never be able to adequately preserve what a James Rhodes Maximum Charming Bro-Wink looks like up close. (It would also confuse HR if he tried to explain that he had broken his own bottom line and not to fire anyone else, so he chalks it up to his own stupidity.) He is still too shocked to get out his burning question of _why are you here and not with the fancy Wakandan scientists and royalty who love you and want to keep you forever unlike the racist US military?_

Tony is really working to not put a foot in his mouth, and it’s hard. Rhodes is now patting another bot’s head and has a crowd of worshipful hangers on because they know Tony will not yell at them in front of the head of operations. Tony stares doggedly at the holographic display.

The Illustrious Dr. Rhodes also looks over at the hologram table and Tony didn’t think it could get worse but it does, because this is Tony’s life, where things just get worse immeasurably until he relapses and wakes up with booze-breath and everyone goes back to not looking him in the eyes while they dance around firing him or not.

“Hey, is that a … looping coil mechanism? What’s the secondary coil for? You don’t have to explain or anything if it’s not, I mean, done yet or relevant or anything,” says Rhodes, seeming like he’s excited to be analyzing Tony’s half-written notes and shitty finger doodles. “Also please don’t hack the email of a random Wakandan diplomat, Tony, it’s been a hard enough week without actual overt political danger.”

Tony wonders morosely if immediately is too soon to jumpstart the relapse process. He’ll go quietly to the firing squad, really he will.

However, a decade or two or 3.5 of practice at functioning on autopilot while compartmentalizing means he just wordlessly rewrites the notes with a sarcastic flair to say "Shincess Puri". Rhodes watches, then chuckles to himself. Tony feels like he’s ready to shake out of his skin just from the low sound.

“Ok, so whatever name for the Wakandan scientists that won’t get me in legal hot water, you can use. But you know you can just give me a call or shoot me an email and I can do that for you? No hacking required, no international incidents.”

Tony mutters something sotto voce about how that’s no fun. He sees Rhodes cover a grin with his hand and pretend to be rubbing his barely-there stubble, damn do all-nighters look good on the man, and Tony can’t help but start bouncing his leg to let off the excess energy. The stool he’s on squeaks in protest at being a heatsink.

“Well, I’d normally take you up on that, Mr. Easy Way Out, but I like to keep my ideas well in my line of sight and verifiably my intellectual property—”

“And hacking a diplomat’s email is doing that, how?”

“—but as no one let me talk to the delegation or Her Awesomeness, because I’m, I don’t know, not a title holding savant instead of just a crazy bastard, and only suited to setting up the powerpoint projector display before being kicked out by supervisors and then scary warrior ladies for looking at people funny—”

“Wait, what? What did you try to—”

“—despite _not doing anything_ , man, your horrible paranoid cynicism is showing again, where was I? I was going somewhere with this.”

“I didn’t mean you did something wrong, Tony, I meant what were you trying to talk to Sh—Her Highness about that got the Dora Milaje up in arms?”

“Don’t think I didn’t hear that little slip up, getting _cozy_ with royalty, huh?”

“Tony,” Rhodes says, his brow furrowing slightly. There’s a note in his wonderful voice that speaks to a much more difficult day of herding cats (ha, ha) than Tony can conceive of having, and Tony nearly flails his way off of his stool by accident, trying to belay the inevitable frown marring a truly stellar face.

“No, no, it’s cool, any of the royalty there would treat you way better than the gold diggers here, for fucking sure, I could care less who you are or aren’t banging—” Now Rhodes is rubbing his eyes and probably frowning fully and Tony would like to go back to the point where his longtime science hero looked excited to be talking to him and not reminded that Tony is the human equivalent of a raging stress headache on legs with a drinking problem.

“Tony, I’m not sleeping with a teenager, no matter how brilliant. Or any of the Wakandan delegates. Or anyone, really, at this point.”

Tony can feel his brain breaking at this news, and his jaw is probably subterranean at this point. Not because it means anything, Tony has no illusions in regards their respective levels of like, compatibility or literally any metric to compare them—hopeless admiration is a nice comfy spot to spend his days on—but because it means Rhodes is single, which is a true and heartbreaking tragedy he can’t process fully. Rhodes has had tons of arm candy, sure, but he’s never outright stated to anyone if he’s seeing anyone long term—Tony would know, he has every interview and every fluff piece ever produced. Tony wonders how long this has been the case. James Rhodes is deserving of all the nice things, like super-smart Princess girlfriends who he totally did not know were in their teens, how old is she, maybe super-smart Prince boyfriends instead then, and shiny awards and rocket propulsion and blow jobs and ok, Tony is going to move on from thinking about that.

“Well, then I guess you should remedy that, that is very sad for you and all—” Rhodes is now turning his truly stunning eyes to the burn-cratered ceiling in clear desperation and will probably find an excuse to leave in short order, which is the absolute worst outcome, he is trying to say something but Tony will not allow him to escape before he has gotten them back to good.  
  
“—but my point was, was that if I can’t win this tiny and ultimately pointless victory in my never ending struggle to be seen as a legitimate contributor to capital-s Science on my own, than I don’t want you sharing on my behalf out of the goodness of your noble heart. My hoard of ideas that would be great if people would acknowledge as having merit, present company excepted of course, are mine to promote and I am trying to share my wealth like I’m an exhausted reverse dragon, Rhodes—”

“No, don’t… don’t call me that, Tony. I might be the boss out there, but I’d like to think we’re friends, even if it’s just in the Frankenlab since my schedule is nuts.”

Tony wonders if this is what outer space is like, where there is no oxygen and also no gravity. A person just floats off, untethered and terrified by the chasms of possibility. Rhodes (James? What do you call the man who is everything?) considers them to be friends.

“Of course we’re friends, you sentimental _marshmallow center_ ,” Tony says, with a bravado he has no relation to, and is far too familiar with to be healthy. He pokes James in the tie-lacking sternum with the end of a finger, as it is right there, and also because he believes in the saying about an inch and a mile. James is grinning down at him.

“We’d be BFFs except for how you apparently like to spend time with crazy people who punch aliens for fun instead of any sane activity. Can’t you just take up dodgeball or lasertag like a normal co-worker bonding experience? Have a regular mid-life crisis where you get a non-superpowered hobby? I bet you’d be anal enough to actually enjoy cross-stitch. Make your hero buddies some wall hangings that say ‘My Other Ride is Iron Man’ with some flowers and hearts, go really fucking wild.”

James is honest to god laughing, bent back slightly and wiping tears. Tony mentally congratulates himself, and tries not to preen too visibly. He’d normally be thinking about jumping in a lake and becoming Namor’s competition for people-avoiding right about now, but in the face of a delighted James Rhodes who is friends with him and wants to be called by name, he figures he can stick around a bit more. Also he’s here until 9pm because that’s when the next train that goes where he needs is; his commute is shitty.

James is wheezing slightly, and claps a hand on Tony’s shoulder which would freak him out if it were anyone but him (or Nat, she freaks him out for other reasons entirely.) Tony thinks his own face is probably pretty dopey-looking, but he thinks it might also be stuck smiling in response. He can play it off.

“Tones, you’re something else. I missed the hell outta you.” Maybe he can’t play it off now. He tries anyway, elbowing what would be a gut on a lesser man.

“Yeah yeah, cupcake, you’re charming my socks off here. Did you wanna hear about the schematics or not?”

“Yeah, show me the dragon hoard of brilliant ideas, Tony.” He drags the last syllable out.

“Reverse dragon, Rhode-y, try to keep up," Tony replies.  
  
“What would that even be? A fire extinguisher?”

“Hush, it’s clearly too advanced a metaphor for your pretty little head,” Tony says, fighting down giggles. Rhodey looks like he’s going to say something else, keep being ridiculous with Tony as if it’s nothing special, but then the RLI-pad in his pocket starts beeping like Tony has personally offended it. Tony will re-upgrade his Faraday cage mechanisms as soon as possible, but he can’t really even be that mad, of course Rhodey’s personal tech would trump his hodgepodge anti-Yinsen field.

“Shit, I’m sorry, looks like superhero stuff,” Rhodey says, fiddling with his watch to pull out the gauntlets. “I’ll see you later, maybe in a few days I can sneak out of lunch, or—”

“One, literally never apologize for being Iron Man to me, and two, get your butt out the door.”

Rhodes is already leaving, but he pauses at the external door to turn back to Tony.

“My butt?” Tony is lost for words, the pet names didn’t merit a comment but the casual reference to the Amazing Iron Ass is what gets picked up on? He wasn’t staring, was he? Oh god, what if he was staring, Tony thinks in terror until Rhodey grins at him.

“Yours is the only visible butt around here, though. Nice boxers, by the way. Good use of the employee discount on merch.”

Tony looks down at his hot pink “Love Machine” boxers printed with hearts and little Iron Man masks as the door shuts, and realizes that he never actually received his sweats from Dino.

Who is going to be melted down and used to barricade the damn door shut so Tony will never have to face the world again.

Dino probably knows her days are numbered, and that is why she is hiding and not nearby. All the bots are clicking again, because the world is cold and unloving, and he must cling to the memory of James “Rhodey” Rhodes, Most Beautiful Human in the World, laughing at his dumb jokes, like the Little Matchstick Girl delusionally imagining warmth, except without the happy ending where she is saved from Dickensian misery by death. He puts his head down on the holographic table and thinks that maybe he can beat Namor after all.

The door is opened again.

Tony has no concept of time anymore so he makes no prediction as to who it is this time. He mutely stares as Natalie drifts in with tumbler glass and bottle of booze in hand, noting that her roots are just starting to show in her blonde bob haircut . She’s taking her heels off daintily, chatting at him.

“Wow, so I ran into your favorite dreamboat Dr. Rhodes in the elevator, and he w—”

She takes in the scene, from the bots’ harassment, to the boxers, to Tony’s doubtless thousand yard stare. Being a terrifying not-super-spy, she puts two and two together correctly and cracks up immediately. Tony puts his head back down.

His phone, somewhere in the lab, pings, and Nat goes to find it, presumably to be further amused by his life.

“Oh, no, Tony….” He doesn’t even lift his head, despite the genuine concern in her voice. He’s that ready to be done with the day.

“I’ll get you a ride home with a cab or something. It looks like Doombots have messed up the subway, again.”

Of course they did.

“спасибо,” Tony tells her. “Have a drink on my behalf, would you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, so I edited some stuff as I didn't know Shuri was 16 (I thought she was in her twenties like T'Challa cause I got overloaded with work and stopped having time to go and get the BP releases so I haven't read that far in the series and I've been avoiding the trailers for the film because I want my socks rocked all the way off) but hoo boy let's not make that weird, mea culpa.


	2. in which this universe’s version of the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist kind of hates his coworkers and wants to be left alone to have a mild crush in peace.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim doesn't want anything to get in the way of spending time with his favorite science bro, but duty calls.
> 
> Even though his team is full of dicks and he has unresolved jealousy issues. 
> 
> Whatever, he's Iron Man, he can keep it professional. It's fine.
> 
> (Goddamn it, Clint Barton.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's what Rhodey is up to, post Tony-visit.
> 
> Oh, and head's up that Pietro isn't in this either. I haven't decided if he's around or nah. He might be with the X-men for kicks and Eurythmics montages, don't ask me. Wanda isn't in a relationship with Vision (or Pietro, comics what the actual fuck). Does Vision exist here? Don't know, same deal as Pietro. 
> 
> Pepper is around though. Pepper is necessary for the functioning of the resident genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, regardless of the universe, it is known.

The so-called Doombots aren’t much of a match for the few Avengers that Cap’s called in to deal with the situation. Jim would feel bad about being late to the party, except it’s not much of one to miss.

Up high, he thinks the meager numbers and poorly functioning units point to it being either a decoy for some other event, or someone using a recognizable villain’s style. Or both. He’s just about to point that out when the Captain beats him to the punch.

“These can’t be Doombots, they’re going down too easy. What are we missing here?” his voice asks, patching over the static of the comm line.

“Yeah, with a careful eye they look nothing like the usual metal bullshit he sends, too,” adds Hawkeye’s voice. “Explode the same, though.”

“Mind the blast radius, Hawkeye. Even if the civilians are out of the area, we need to contain the damage. Wasp, any further input from up close?”

Janet’s voice is muffled, but then a stray bot collapses into a parked car and it clears up. “They’re being remotely operated, but it’s not like Doom’s M.O. You know, with the central box and weapons caches? These ones’ internal mechanisms are really bare bones, not like the ones we dealt with last time, or even last year.”

Jim has an idea of what that might mean, not that it clears anything up as to why.

“Are they like the bots from before von Doom had all the Latverian resources, Wasp?” he says, adjusting his HUD screens to better analyse the heat signatures and metal content from the downed units. They don’t look normal, either. Could they be an earlier model?

“Iron Man, so glad you could join us despite your super important workload!” Wanda’s accented voice is sarcastically cheerful. In the suit, Jim rolls his eyes as Hawkeye patches in just to laugh at him. He steals a kill shot from him to a Doombot’s core with a repulsor blast in retaliation. Hawkeye grumbles and patches out.

“If you’re telling me off for being late, I’ll remind you that I was with the official Wakandan scientific delegation this whole week and most of today.” Jim flies higher to assess the area for other action or threats coming at the team.

“Hmm, guess that’s why Her Majesty was totally not over airspace to D.C. two hours ago, way before these fake Doombots showed up,” says Janet’s voice, just as chipper and accusatory.

“Oh, so the second my day job ends, I’m on call?” Jim fires back good-naturedly. “Who was it that couldn’t show two whole days before her fashion gala?”

“Hey! We can’t all be billionaires made of renewable resources and private jets, ok?”

“It was in _Manhattan_ , you need a jet to get there?"

“Well maybe during Fashion Week, I did!”

“Keep details off the comms, Iron Man,” says Cap’s voice, sounding amused. “Scarlet Witch, start clearing the area of rubble, we’ve only got a few more to take down. Hawkeye, keep an eye on her six.”

“You’re gonna give me grief and not Wasp?” Jim says after the orders have been heard. “Really, Cap? Bad leadership, right there.” The affected area seems contained to a few streets, even though the Not-Doombots can fly. He doesn’t want there to be more damage, but it’s definitely hinky.

“Everyone knows you’re Iron Man, Rhodes, it’s the opposite of classified info,” Cap shoots back, as Hawkeye starts laughing again, this time with Janet joining in by blowing him a raspberry over the comm line.

“Yeah, okay, Captain Tight Pants,” he says. It's not like the comm lines lack top notch RLI security that will let him know immediately if there's unwanted access. “Try to keep some bits of these things for my labwork, see if we can find anything there.”

Hawkeye and Cap get the final few units, with Jim’s assist to corral them down to towards ground level. Part of the street is torn up to give them cover from bots and raining debris, courtesy of Wanda, but only Clint is using it as intended. Cap, being the reckless idiot he pretends to not be, is pirouetting or something to launch the shield up higher. Jim is very glad that Falcon is off in DC to help with the main delegation from Wakanda, instead of making the antics worse with an airlift. The damages are gonna be high enough as it is.

Eventually the mission redirects to clean up. Cap is doing the visibility thing, directing traffic and helping the PD take the reins; Witch is getting the street back to level with Wasp giving coordinates to help guide the magically-lifted chunks of cement and asphalt into place. Hawkeye is collecting his arrows like Jim can’t provide enough back up quivers to fill an 18-wheeler or five.

Jim is still up high, as per Cap’s instruction, keeping track of anything else on the horizon, like that kid that somehow got what is clearly prototyped and retrofitted RLI tech without the tracking devices, and decided to use it to bungee jump off of buildings like a certifiable nutcase. Can’t be more than a high schooler, but at least Jim doesn’t see him around right now. Probably still wall-crawling in Queens, the little punk.

Speaking of punks who don’t know when to quit, Hawkeye patches in again to continue what his second-favorite teammate started. “So a little bird says you were visiting your pet scientist when you got the call to assemble, not off work. Care to explain, Iron Man?”

Wanda and Janet both patch in, talking over each other excitedly at any chance of drama or harassment. Cap is clearly ignoring them all.

Jim is going to make Natasha pay for this. She smirked at him over her folders in the elevator, and he regrets not just going up the staircase in the suit like he’d usually do when he wants to avoid meddlers. Science-bros-time is rare and special when it comes to Tony. If Natasha’s telling tales to Clint of all people, Jim is going to get revenge. He will probably fail at that, he knows. It’s justified for him to at least try, though.

He’s also failing to not dwell on how she might or might not know Tony better than him, might know if he’d be fine with getting joked about by superheroes like that. Might or might not be sleeping with Tony, given how much time she spends in his company when she’s playing secretary. 

Tony doesn’t wear pants or shirts in his lab sometimes, apparently. Tony gets covered in machining oil and grease and god know what else, takes off some clothes, it makes sense. Still, Jim commits it to memory any time he’s there and Tony’s showing off good real estate, arms and abs and all of that. Hot pink boxers, Jim has discovered. He suspects Natasha’s involvement in that one—he’s pretty sure the crazy shit for sale is in the visitor areas only, which Tony avoids like his life depends on it—and now he’s back to dwelling on things he doesn’t need to think about while on a mission.

It’s fine. Tony should have friends, benefits or no, that genuinely enjoy his company. That’s great. It’s 100% okay that she might be hitting that. If Natasha makes him happy, that’s great.

“Is this the one who helped make the polymer in my wings bulletproof? And the one who has a bunch of AI that he just makes out of thin air when he’s bored?” asks the voice of Janet, and Jim feels himself relax slightly. Maybe Natasha just mentioned his being in Tony’s area off-handedly.

“Oh, the one you keep sneaking out of meetings to go play with? In his special lab you had made for him?” asks the voice of Wanda, who is better friends with Natasha than Jim has realized, to his detriment.

“Wait, really? Ooh, Iron Man, you’ve been skipping out on work for playdates?” Janet sounds delighted. She’s back to full size on the ground, and he knows she’s waiting for him to get there to tease even more. He will have vengeance against them all.

“Bunch of gossips,” he says instead. He flies down to ground level, since there’s no serious activity in the surrounding area, and pops his visor up for some fresh air. “All you want to do is talk to your ‘little bird’, as if I don’t know _exactly_ who is spreading these lies, instead of cutting me some slack for not showing up on the dot. Make me want to quit superhero-ing, if it’s all you gossips in the business.”

He gets soundly yelled over after the word quit. Janet, trying to elbow him, proclaims his ego too big to ever stop. Clint wants to know if his information gathering abilities are being challenged. Wanda is saying something in Sokovak, probably along the same lines as the others if her hand gestures are anything to go by. Cap is trying not to laugh. Jim can see him at the edge of the perimeter from where he’s landed, he’s got his jaw clenched and his shoulders are shaking slightly, the asshole.

Steve finally leaves the police to it, and strides over to the chaos of the team. Somehow he’s all business again. He’s still a dick.

“Avengers, we’re on stand-by, they’ve got the area covered now. Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye, you can leave and head back to the Tower. I’ll stay here as back up. Iron Man, you said you wanted to take some pieces back to your lab to look for possible leads?” Jim nods as the other three depart via magic portal.

“Go for it, but stay clear of the police ribbon.” Steve is already headed off to give the press some photos of Captain America being heroic and noble with the police force.

Jim looks at his retreating figure. The fighting’s damaged the majority of two or three blocks, including the subway underneath, pretty badly: Doombot-shaped craters and molten holes from Wanda’s offensive. He feels pretty bad about how that’s gonna mess up several thousand commutes, but there’s no deaths and limited injuries, so he’ll take it as a net zero.

He remembers that Tony takes the train back late. Maybe he can get back to the labs in time to drop off the fake Doombot bits, and see if Tony needs anything. If Natasha isn’t already there doing that, since she was headed down after she didn’t get called to assemble. He understands why, tactically speaking, but it’s still irritating. At least he can check if Tony’s badge has registered leaving the building yet. If it has, well, good. The man needs to get some rest. If not, well, maybe he can text Natasha something passive aggressive about telling Clint dumb shit instead of heading out.

He shoots a series of probably-not-necessary blasts into the nearest heap of fake ‘bots, and loads up various pieces to take back. He really should head straight back to his own floor of the labs, get his Avengers-related team of techs on the analysis, and jet off to the Avengers Tower to go over what’s happening and who’s taking the lead on what missions.

He knows he’ll probably end up working on it himself, alone, until Pepper bugs him to leave when she comes back in the morning.

Jim really wants to go listen to Tony talk about schematics, but he’s pretty sure Tony was humoring him on that. Tony gets this look sometimes when he’s talking to him, like he’s a cat that hears a can opener. Waiting for something. And sometimes suddenly he finds it, and Jim never knows what it is that he did right.

Tony is an enigma, but he's the best kind of enigma because the prize for solving whatever's up with him is always amazing. The looping coil drawing is still in the back of Jim's mind.

He flies over to Cap to ask if he needs a ride back, and tries not to think about cross stitch phrases. Wanda isn’t likely to want to portal more people over after a fight where she did most of the heavy lifting, but Cap declines, saying he’ll get back on his own. Like superstardom levels of fame and a cowl with wings can just take their happy asses back on the bus. If the press isn't on their way already, that'd get them swarming like ants. Not Jim's problem, though, he is gonna let the universe take its course on that..

“Oh, and Iron Man?” Steve looks tired, or at least tired for a supersoldier, but there’s a twinkle in his eye that Jim is instantly suspicious of.

“I’ll need a note from Ms. Potts with an _actual_ reason if you end up missing the briefings, because now I gotta check if you’re playing hooky with your scientist pal.”

Jim wonders if he’s going to get anything done ever again, or if it’s going to be just thinking about Tony 24/7 because now that the team is aware that he’s sensitive about their friendship, not one of these utter assholes will let him forget it. He flips Steve off and carts his scrap metal haul up with him in a traction lock as he flies away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spoiler alert, solving the enigma of why Tony looks at you funny when you visit the Batcave? will get you the most awesome prize of getting laid, Rhodey. Get on that problem solving, go getchu some.
> 
> Lol, like it'll be that simple! 
> 
> Thanks for reading. updates are sporadic at best, it's a sales weekend here and I gotta go hustle, but the subscription button is free, my loves.


	3. in which the resident loser stares at a fish that is uncomfortably relatable, and contemplates respective towel cleanliness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony isn't having a good time. A fluid-dynamics-challenged goldfish is having a better time than him. His cousin is having— ok, probably not a great time either, actually, now that he's called at an ungodly hour, but whatever.
> 
> Viva la weekend. Fuck nightmares.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, I should probably have a content warning for this chapter, mostly in that Tony isn't a mentally well dude. It's not really very intense, but just a heads up for how living with PTSD after a number of years can be sometimes. 
> 
> Seriously, he's fine and it's not mad angsty or explicit.

Tony’s life and mental health are not in order. He is acutely aware of this, and the myriad ways he is still rebuilding himself. He hates the way it’s not a design he can take apart and tinker with, how he’s not able to re-enforce a strut or rewire a board to fix the most basic glitches. Instead, everything is snarled together into the shell of a person, tangled around the shrapnel in his torso and into the scars on his surface. There’s no piece to start with that doesn’t unravel him, however slowly.

It’d almost be poetic, except for the drugs and drinking. He’s been clean for five years, as of three months ago. He’s wanted to fall off the wagon every day of it. He wants to now.

He stares at the ceiling of his shoebox studio apartment, as the sweat cools. His blankets are sodden and cling to him where he hasn’t shoved them to the ends of his futon bed, kicking them off like escaping a body bag. Only one sock has stayed on. He should get up and shower, get on new clothes and something to wash the taste of bile from his mouth.

Instead he sits up and looks over to his ridiculous fish tank. Its swarm of tiny black fish, medium reddish-orange fish, and slow grey snails in their blue-green paradise continue to move and exist independent of his labored breathing. All the plants are free of mold and algae, swaying slightly. The incredibly dumb goldfish is stuck in the corner again, asleep and floating in fishy stupor. The aquarium light casts shadows over all his many piles of messes and papers that line the apartment, and the dust motes that pass through the beams make him feel like he’s in a very odd snowglobe. He waits for it to settle.

When he’s calm, and his hands aren’t shaking any more, he gets up from the mattress. He wades through the floor detritus to check the tank set up. The filters are humming away smoothly, the temperature gauge is normal, the aeration vent is fine, all his kingdom’s tiny subjects are accounted for, and the plants have minimal nibbling from inquisitive mouths. The routine of going over the tank usually helps with the insomnia, but the special appearance of flashback nightmares means Tony’s not nodding off so easily again. His therapist talks about how addiction and PTSD play off of each other to isolate him from the world and from getting help.

Tony is fine with the isolation. People are frequently boring or annoying. Yes, it’s good to not be a hermit, but the ‘getting help’ never seems to work in his favor with other people, when they aren’t family. Or friends. Of which he has three now, apparently. He’s not counting Peter, as he’s like 12 years old or something and also their relationship seems to be more based on poor decision making and mutual admiration of superheroes.

Peter had been helping him clean the fish tank in exchange for getting caught using Tony’s skylight to get up to no good, when the little shit had found all the sealed boxes of Iron Man articles. It was a bonding moment, up until Tony had mentioned that Dr. Rhodes was his boss and they’d met briefly in undergrad.

Then it had turned into Twenty Questions, and somehow ended up with Tony giving a minor experimental technology and designs for an undersuit that might have been for Iron Man armoring but is now barely similar. Tony prays he won’t be responsible for the kid’s death, but Peter seems to have a portion of his shit together and understands scientific thought, so all hope is not lost. Plus there’s bulletproofing tucked into most of the vital areas. And maybe a fuckton of other defensive features if things get nasty. Tony needs to retrofit some new venom stings, though.

It’s the weekend now, the alarm clock on the dinky kitchenette shelf proclaims in red numbers. Maybe Peter will show up at some point and Tony can make him get Mrs. C’s battle tank of a sewing machine and they’ll be able to do some work on the suit.

Tony wades over to the kitchenette for a glass of water. The bastardized coffee machine tries to turn on at the sensing of his motion in the cabinets. He unplugs it before the percolator reservoir starts filling with water. He still feels like an internal wire in his brain is sparking over a puddle, but he feels less like grabbing it than he did when he woke up. It’s not fully gone, though. The impulse to just get it over with, succumb to it.

Back in bed with water in tow, he calls Sharon.

“I know you’re not waking up at this hour of dawn regularly,” she says after the second ring. “What’s going on, Tony?”

“Oh fuck, wait, are you still in Zürich?” he asks, mentally kicking himself.

“No, Córdoba. Answer the question, Tony.”

He half-heartedly grumbles at her brusque response. That’s what he gets for having a cousin in espionage, there’s no room for bullshit in the rest of her life. He really doesn’t want to get into it, but he did want to talk to her, it’s been a while. Even if right now is not really the optimal time.

“If I say bad dreams, you’ll laugh at me, or maybe hang up,” he starts, fiddling with his frayed shirt hem, but she just sighs like she expected it, like she knows already, and cuts him off.

“How was the Wakandan delegation’s visit?”

“Oh, are you free for the next seven hours? Because that is how long it will take for me to even get into one tenth of how awesome it was, Shar, you have no idea _—_ ”

“Fine, fine, I get it. Tell me about your fish tank, then.”

“I know what you’re doing, you’re not my therapist and you don’t have to do this.”

"So you killed all your fish with neglect, is what I’m hearing.”  
  
“No, you terrible person, they are fine. How come you get to deflect and I don’t, huh?”  
  
“Even Blobbert? Is he still upright?”

For some reason that goldfish is her favorite of his collection. Blobby is everyone’s favorite, and Tony has no idea why, the idiot barely does anything beyond attempt to eat pebbles and get stuck in the frankly very mild filter current.

“Yes, he’s still as blissfully unaware of how close he is to the end of his mortal coil as ever. He’s stuck in the shame corner again, I’m letting him sleep there until the morning.”

“Is he eating properly? Is he still having trouble swimming upright?”

“Fat and happy, but still tilting too much.” Tony wants to ask why Sharon cares about the fish so damn much, but that means he has to examine why he himself obsesses over an aquarium, and if he wanted to do that he’d just call his therapist and leave incoherent voicemails. More than he normally does.

“Poor guy. Check him for tumors again, might be a culprit.”

“Roger that.”

“This is the part of the conversation where I could use questions about your fish to ask about your life and why you’re calling me. Pretend I’m being sneaky, would you?”

Sharon is a treasure, and Tony wouldn’t trade her for the world or anything in it, even vibranium.

“Very sneaky, Agent,” he says, to hear her snort softly over the phone.

“That’s a love. Now spill.”

God, she sounds like their aunt Peggy; Tony is hit with a wave of grief and nostalgia that he tamps down. Sharon’s been overdosing on her work and he doesn’t want to blindside her if she’s still on assignment. More than he already has.

“I dreamt about Afghanistan, hasn’t happened in a while. I woke up feeling kind of out of it.”

“What was the dream, flashbacks or just the feeling of being there?”

_His unit, his captors. Losing track of time. The way dust and blood tastes. The sound of—_

“Don’t really remember,” he lies. “Just I thought I was still there, you know? Feeling trapped.”

“Yeah,” she says, and they stay quiet for a while like that.

She’s not really as bad as he is, with the post-flashback calls and the recovery set backs, but she’s not a stranger to being on his side of the line. They’re not exactly close, having mostly met via Peggy’s influence, but they’re more or less family by this point. A few hundred hours as each other’s medical proxy does that to people.

“Did you shower yet? I can smell you through the phone.”

Tony will take the vibranium in trade now, Sharon is mean. It does startle a laugh out of him, however. She’s much better at teasing out a smile than he is, always has been.

“Fuck off, I’m having a drink first,” he says, looking around for a towel. “By which I mean water, not alcoholic drinks, because I am a responsible adult.” He ignores the dubious noise from the other end of the line.

There’s one towel-like object that is most likely irredeemably gross over the door to the bathroom, but there’s also a promising peek of fluffiness under some messily-folded pants on his table.

“So stinky,” his cousin says, like a professional government woman-in-black and not a five year old who doesn’t like the new kid at the family dinner.  “Be sure to tell Blobbert I love him. The fish, not a fish-shaped metaphor for you. You’re okay, but Blobby needs the affection.”

“Thanks, Sharon.” He knows it sounds more genuine that he intended, but he’s suddenly exhausted again. Whatever, it’s the weekend. He’ll sleep until he’s back to his normal grumpy self, instead of this clingy sentimental bastard.

“I’d say any time, but I’d be lying. Seriously, though, take care of yourself, okay?”

“Sure thing. Love from NYC and all,” he says through a yawn.

“Love from wherever the fuck I’m headed to next. I’ll be out of reach for two weeks or so.”

They say goodbyes and hang up. Tony feels like maybe he can achieve a shower instead of a binge drinking session so it’s a further improvement from when he woke up. He finishes the water, and pulls all the bed sheets and blankets off into a pile to wash at some point, and then goes to see if it’s really a clean towel that he can use for a shower.

He’s fine, for now. He wants to be less of a shitshow as a person, but he’s been doing this long enough to know the small victories are the best benchmarks. He can’t really rip his own brain open to figure out how he works, he’s got to tinker and recalibrate on a different timeframe because it’s the one part of his world he can’t play God in.

This is what he’s telling himself to avoid thinking about a scotch.

The fishtank hums softly in the background, and Tony nearly trips over a lone shoe as he passes, manages not to fall over. Small victories.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise that Natasha POV is forthcoming. I do not know when I'll be updating next.
> 
> Peter can be fancast by you, lovely reader, as any version of Peter you'd like except Toby Maguire. Sorry, I can't take his face seriously. (Also if you haven't read this masterpiece yet, do so: [ here clicky clicks for stunning writing of coping with trauma that is a billionty times more amazing than this chapter also peter is bi i don't make the rules](https://beachdeath.tumblr.com/post/165304971453/beachdeath-like-this-post-if-i-should-leak-the) hopefully that works?)


	4. in which the true master plan of a dino-bot is revealed, as is the master plan of the world’s best fake secretary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha is a woman on a mission, except not really a mission, but it's important because Tony, maybe be less of a hot mess 24/7? Please? Do it for Nat?
> 
> The bots understand. (Except that one, who just wants to be free to seek out loose change in the outside world. It's not happening.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's what Natasha has been doing, aside from gossip.
> 
> Lol, jk, it's gossip nonstop regardless.

It’s 4.30 am on Saturday, and a figure mostly unrecorded by the hallway CCTV is making its way towards a nondescript door in the basement of Rhodes Labs International.

Anyone viewing the scene would assume that the janitorial staff for this section of RLI is slated to clean before the standard work hours begin. This is not incorrect, but the staff doesn’t include this figure, now outside the door. There’s no amazing music backdrop for this B&E, though, so the figure is humming to make up for it.

And now the Black Widow begins to gain illicit access to the top-security lab vault of one Dr. Anthony E. S. Jarvis, despite his best efforts to make his lab impenetrable.

What, like it’s hard?

Honestly, the two part code is incredibly straightforward to deal with. Based on the time entered in military hours with the date in the Judaic calendar, an algorithm yields a single-use key, which is then used to unlock a cipher. The phrase to decrypt is dependant on the key’s timestamp and since Tony is a nerd, it’s one of a rotating selection of his beloved sci-fi authors’ quotes.

It’s like he doesn’t even care if she gets in or not.

Today’s is “Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss”, because Tony is also in love with his boss and so all of his quotes are poorly disguised homages to Rhodes. More or less. Sometimes they’re just about his hard on for science, not for Rhodes. Probably. It’s difficult to tell where the line is. The poor idiot thinks he is being sneaky.

But, cue bad Russian-villain-in-cinema accent, only Natasha is sneaky. She may feel like humming her own personal awesome soundtrack when she’s not actually on a mission from SHIELD or Fury, but goddamn it, she’s the best.

Well, sometimes Bruce gets the drop on her, but that’s more because normal people don’t do yoga in the mornings before work and give their fake secretaries near-heart attacks when they go to clear out the used mug pile on the desk. Bruce is annoying like that. Especially because he grins like he knows he scared her, even though she gave no indication of being startled. 

Jerk. She’s gonna hide his chamomile honey hibiscus green tea in revenge. It’s a limited edition blend, he can’t just order more. 

Who the hell comes in on Saturday after a weeklong diplomatic tour to do extra paperwork and mock their teammates, anyway? Aside from her, that is, but she’s here mostly to not really be useful to RLI but to further her own agenda. Bruce should be sleeping in, like Tony had better be doing, after she bought him a cab ride home yesterday. 

Once she’s into the Tony-Cube, and has dismantled the blackout effect, all the bots take it as their cue to mob her. It’s like a slow, rattling wave of misshapen metal dogs fully in Uncanny Valley territory, very enthusiastically trying to say hello.

Tony pretends he doesn’t enjoy it when the AI imitate affection; Nat does no such thing and picks the two smaller ones up to ride on her shoulders. One of them, in charge of fetching writing utensils and rubber bands, tries to get her to pet it, while the other, a small lamp holder, blinks the light happily. She’s more of a cat person, overall, but it’s hard to not like the crew. Especially when they’re such good secret agents.

She’s looking around for her best partner in crime as the larger ones butt their heads into her calves and palms of her hands, but there’s no  Prachka  in sight. Hmm. She puts Ishcheyka down, keeping Lampochka steady, and whistles a passable imitation of Tony’s typical “hello”.

Prachka was originally designed to put away clothing and shoes. Tony is in vehement denial of this, but Tasha suspects he’s some combination of unaccommodated ADHD and ASD. The man hates being fully clothed.

She’s not complaining about it; Tony works out with a military regularity that is most likely a coping mechanism for no longer being in a regimented routine, and ergo he’s got the whole slim but stacked physique going on. His butt is very nice.

Also she’s worked with people with way worse functioning issues, Tony’s frenetic rambling and habit of leaving shit everywhere has nothing on Coulson without adequate sleep and caffeination. Or Bruce without meditation. Or Clint in general.

All of her friends are bizarre reflections on the human condition. Fury once said collecting strange broken men as friends was a charming way to express her desire to save the world. She sewed rhinestones onto his good eye-patch for that. They spelled out JUICY. He wore it for a week and accessorized his shoes. Tasha aspires to his level.

She hears the clicking of robot feet on the industrial flooring, and Prachka rounds the corner with her giant bag of Tony-clothes in her grasp. Excellent, the bot is getting better at her second, unofficial job. Tony did say they were self-developing AIs, so Nat has taken that as permission to modify some parameters, add to the data corpus a little bit.

Because while Tony understands that he needs to pick up discarded clothing if he ever wants to find it again, he’s missed the part where you need to fucking wash it after that. 

She understands why he’s like this, see cited articles ‘strange broken men’ and ‘used to be a homeless vet with PTSD.’ Frankly she’s proud he’s made progress to the point where it’s a matter of habit and not profound mental disturbance or desperation that Tony wears things to exhaustion.  But it does prevent him from being taken seriously or seen as a viable option for social advancement, such as dating.

She’s given up on changing his ideas about facial hair grooming, though. Some battles are just not worth it.

At her gesture, Prachka dumps the bag onto the holographic table where Tasha has helpfully pulled up the guides to fabric care by type, washing machine symbols and meanings, and color restrictions in separating loads. Prachka gets to work under her watchful eye, and Lampochka sends the bot relevant color information for each piece of clothing. Ishcheyka is burrowing into the pockets for loose change and other treasures. Tasha sits back and supervises, making corrections to the bots’ decisions on the holographic coding GUI she hijacked for communicating after having decided to deputize them.

As they work, and the various other robots go about their tasks or return to their charging stations now that the excitement is over, Tasha checks her various phones to see what her day job is up to. 

The secure Avengers mission group chat is:   


  * a lot of back and forth of the Wakanda visit security details from Falcon and the temporarily allowed Black Panther
  * everyone’s two cents on the weird Doombot fakes
  * alerts on several bomb threats that seem to be a single culprit
  * various texts about who’s on or off duty
  * planned meetings at the Tower



The non-mission chat is entirely:

  * the team giving ridiculous suggestions to Steve and Sam about how to deal with long distance romance and, quote “keep the love alive”
  * Janet’s counter that Sam should leave Steve for Prince T’challa (or a Dora Milaje) if he feels like he needs less superhero drama in his life
  * Jim agreeing (like a damn hypocrite) that Sam should date a brother instead of Steve, if only for the increase in the Avengers Insurance Damages rollover funding
  * Wanda’s offer to magic portal Steve to DC for an hour or two if they’d all shut up about it
  * Steve spamming them with obnoxious memes
  * Clint spamming them with Photogenic Steve Rogers memes
  * Captain Marvel, who is in actual space right now, saying she will turn around and come to Earth to deal out some pain if they don’t stop using up her data.



Prachka pauses to reassess her handiwork at Tasha’s delighted cackling. Tasha types in a few lines of code to communicate that all is well. One would think the bots would adjust to ignore random laughter, given the environment here, but now that she reflects on it, Tony probably does need to be contained if he’s laughing maniacally. 

Tasha does have a reason to be around that’s not purely altruistic, but unlike with Bruce, where it’s above board and understood by all parties, Tony would probably sulk or take it as a challenge to go fully nuclear.

Next she checks the Eastern European Sexy Bitches And Also Barton chat, which is Wanda, Tasha, Vasilya and Anusha in VIO at RLI, several older women from the local Jewish deli’s stitch'n'bitch who are ex-soviet black ops or old partisan fighters, Mr. Yasha the doorman at the Tower, and of course, Clint Barton. 

The EESB&B chat contains:

  * Mrs Czebucznaja and Mrs Lewi arguing about blin for the eightieth time
  * Wanda chiming in to tell them the Sokovjiak-Rroma recipe is best, apparently a more doughy blend with buckwheat to pair with spicier food (Tasha isn’t gonna get involved in a dispute like that, where there are no winners except Clint eating his weight in different national varieties of what he calls pancakes to harass them all)
  * Mrs.Tobtok asking if Tasha’s “nice young friend Antony” has a weekend free to meet her granddaughter
  * Clint deriding Tony as neither young nor nice nor friendly
  * Mr. Yasha indicating that his own weekend is free to meet granddaughters who might want to adopt kittens instead of scientists, complete with pictures of three tiny monsters and heart emoticons.



This is why Tony isn’t invited to the chat. He would qualify based on his apparent understanding of multiple cyrillic languages whenever she talks near him, but it’d be a hot mess of angry slavic yelling about how he is not eating enough, he is too thin, he needs more meat to be strong.

Speaking of Tony being in dire lack of meat in his diet, it seems one Dr. Rhodes has been blowing up her phone. Reading between the passive-aggressive lines, he appears to be angry that she’s a gossip about his whereabouts in re: Dr. Jarvis. He knows not one tenth of how bad it can get, she can definitely make it worse. 

Prachka has finished in good time. Tasha pulls a disappointed and protesting Ishcheyka out of a sock to put him away. Lampochka climbs back onto her shoulder, blinking again.

The EESB&B chat is fully aware of her ongoing struggle to deal with two idiot geniuses who are trying to pretend they don’t want to passionately make robot babies together anytime they are in proximity. Tony looks like he’s drowning and Jim looks like he’s trying to telepathically get DTF to manifest on his own forehead in christmas lights. It’d be hilarious how neither seems to notice the other doing the same mating dance simultaneously, but it’s been years at this point. The chat has already named the fictional babies.

Tasha’s money is on Clint saying something to him that got Jim all upset. Scientists are a delicate breed, they need less direct attacks. She’s had to plan for the long haul, here, so Clint had better not fuck it up. She texts him about it directly, but hesitates to hit send because he’s probably asleep on the couch at the moment. Then she sends it anyway because she’s cruel like that.

Prachka has loaded up the laundry bag in the correct order, and placed the neon orange biohazard sticker on the side. Tasha holds the door out of the Tony-Cube for her to a chorus of excited bots bidding her adieu in their mechanical way, with one very sad bot complaining in a cabinet to prevent an escape.

Back in her chair, the Black Widow uses top-secret override codes to pull up the CCTV feeds, and follows her agent remotely through the hallways to the department’s cleaning room. All evidence of a presence is scrubbed from the feed under the deft control of the mission handler. The agent gains access, but⏤

⏤Lampochka has apparently been transmitting Prachka’s journey to the others, because they all strobe on and off in glee at the startled janitor’s outburst of devastatingly uncreative swears. Tony’s hatred of random people in his way has rubbed off on them. It’s cute, if a bit headache inducing.

The errant janitor leaves in a hurry, most likely to get his supervisors to deal with the sudden influx of annoyed robot. Time is now critical for the agent. Tasha hums the theme music a bit faster out of habit, but Prachka dumps the bag in the appropriate shute for washing, and wraps her metal tail against the janitorial touchpad to summon the clean laundry. 

Tasha would wipe away a tear of pride at her little minion doing so well, if she were the type to have meaningful emotions instead of ironic detachment and compartmentalization. 

The agent has retrieved the package, and begins to head back to mission control, but the mission handler notices the return of enemy combatants to the region. Damn. It’s a quick fix to have Handler Lampochka relay to Field Agent Prachka the nearest supply closet to hide in, but then it’s nearly 0500 hours until the area is cleared of foreign agents. 

At 5.17 am, Prachka makes it to the lab with her bag of newly washed clothes. There’s no time to fold the laundry, so Tasha directs her to put it into the non-toxic storage area en-suite of the lab. At 5.30, all the bots are back to their charging stations or previous locations, the cube is shut down and the holographic table display wiped of incriminating evidence.

Her phone rings as she’s fixing her hair and jacket. She’s expecting Clint to whine at her about waking him up, but it’s Dr. Ho Yinsen, Bruce’s colleague in department chair-dom.

“Miss Rushman, please tell me Tony is not there in the lab with you,” he says, sounding like he too is newly awoken. Then again, he frequently sounds like that because his job is demanding and Tony is enough to test anyone’s patience.

“Doctor,” she starts in her Natalie is just dumb secretary voice, but he cuts her off.

“I know you are in his lab, and I do not give a rat’s ass what you are doing there. I just want to be sure that the report I received of, hmm, ‘freaky robot ghost shit’ happening on the basement level is not Tony’s latest prototype or something that will involve me needing to go down there.”

“No, he’s not here, Doctor,” she says. Busted. “I do not believe he is responsible for, ah, robot ghosts?”

“Hmm,” says Yinsen. “Well, whomever is in fact responsible for that unverifiable report from the cleaning staff had better not require my intervention if there is a second report, yes?”

“Yes, Doctor, I think that is likely,” Natalie says, walking in her very fashionable heels towards the elevator. “I will not make you deal with second report if I encounter robot ghosts.”

“Hmm,” says Yinsen again, sounding amused. “Hold on.”

There’s noise in the background of the line, and he says something under his breath in response. Natalie boards the elevator up. After the sound of rustling papers and a door closing, Yinsen returns to the line.

“One last thing, Miss Rushman.”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Bruce tells me he’d like his special tea blend back sometime today, but I can assure you of an excellent hiding spot for it if you’d prefer.”

Tasha nearly chokes trying not to laugh. Of course it’s Bruce who snitched. Jerk. 

“I think I will take you up on that, Doctor.”

“Wonderful, I have some tea cookies that will go perfectly. Come to my office.” He hangs up and she presses the button for Yinsen’s floor, smirking. Why can’t Yinsen need a fake secretary? 

Oh well, she’ll get back at Bruce somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, belated Lshana Tovah to anyone out there, Tony's Jewish in this universe cause he's a Jarvis and that means Anna had a say in things. 
> 
> Russian help, disclaimer I don't speak it and wasn't gonna ask my friend Prachka is a washerwoman, Ishcheyka is bloodhound (dog for finding things), and Lampochka is a lightbulb. Nat's the best at naming things, so great.
> 
> Damn, I'm not even to the main plot, this is gonna be a long fic.
> 
> editing to add: also minor changes to some stuff w/Shuri, see first chapter endnote.


	5. THANKS FOR 500 HITS Y'ALL here's a bonus chapter for Rhodey ft. Pepper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhodey did go home after labwork yesterday, Pepper can't give him grief about it this time, right? 
> 
> Pepper disagrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading you guyssss. Here's a lil quick chapter as a gift before I go to work and become a zombie myself. I feel you, Rhodey, why we gotta be places on time, ugh the worst.
> 
> Y'all the real ones, no idea when I update next so sit tight for it. This isn't beta'd so if you see any errors pretend it's cool.

Jim wakes up with a jolt. Pepper’s kicked his chair away from his desk, wonderful woman that she is. Papers have cascaded everywhere. He glares up at her half-heartedly. He did spend too much time in the lab last night, true, but look, he made it home, that’s an improvement.

“Hello to you too, what’s the big⏤”

“No,” says Pepper, holding out a cup of coffee. It smells like his favorite blend of Sumatra Spice Dark. “No, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. Get up, take a shower and shave, you have a meeting in two hours.”

“Ugh, which one,” Jim mumbles, flopping back in his very nice chair. He’s all stiff from falling asleep in a weird position, his neck feels ossified. Fuck, he missed breakfast.

“Check your schedule. I’m not attending it for you, and I’m definitely not taking notes for you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Pep, that is an uncalled for slight to my character.” She looks ready to dump the coffee on his crotch, so he sits up and takes the cup from her.

Her fingers are cold, did she get this herself? That’s odd. It’s early in the morning, sure, but she’s not usually one to go out for a coffee run on her way here to his penthouse. Her fingernails aren’t chipped or anything, and her outfit is as sharp as ever, so it’s probably not a huge issue, but it irks him in a way he can’t describe right now.

“How much do I owe you? Aside from my undying gratitude,” he asks, taking a sip. It’s the perfect temperature, not hot enough to be directly from the pot, and his unease grows. Pepper rolls her eyes at him good-naturedly, and steps back, a precursor to her leaving.

“No, really, Pepper, what’s up? You’re out of sorts, talk to me.” She looks at him, shocked.

“ _How_ did you ⏤ Jim, it’s really not anything important, don’t worry about it. I’m serious, it’s fine.”

“Somehow, that amount of vagueness is less reassuring to me,” he points out. Pepper huffs a not-quite laugh, and puts her hands on her hips.

“How about this, I’ll tell you after your meeting is over,” she saids, angling her head towards the door of his home office in a ‘get-gone’ sort of motion.

“Counteroffer: you tell me now, and then take the rest of the morning off, with pay.”

Pepper raises one perfectly shaped eyebrow.

“And I go to the meeting on time, no complaints.”

“Fine, I agree to those terms,” she says, archly, probably to hide her amusement. Jim drinks his coffee as she comes over to sit on his desk.

“Do you remember how when Obadiah destroyed your building eight years ago, most of your belongings and tech had to be either decontaminated in long-term storage, or rebuilt?”

A cold wave comes over him at her words. Jim wakes up every morning glad to be one day further away from that brutal fight against a man he still desperately wanted to believe was family, but if there’s been any more developments, he’s gonna need more than coffee to face them.

If there’s been a break-in to his storage systems, to the unfinished weapons designs or the abandoned warfare technology after he decided against the military money to sell what was left of his soul⏤ Jim doesn’t want to even consider it. He pays a very large amount of money to three firms to safeguard the evil he once built and prevent it from ever seeing the light of day again.

His face must show something of how he’s feeling, as Pepper immediately picks up on his mood and rushes to reassure him.

“There’s no problem, Jim, everything’s still in the unit and there’s been no security issues since the previous hacking attempt last year.” She puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezes, and where once it might have spurred him into skipping a meeting to keep her on his desk, touching him, now it feels more like she’s grounding him. It helps, but he can’t shake the anxiety bubbling under his skin.

“So you just, what, got a phone call out of the blue about my old shit? C’mon, Pep, spill.”

“Be _quiet_ , I’m getting to that,” she says, whacking his arm lightly. “And I don’t know how you know that, but I had asked around for a few things, nothing classified or majorly risky, and I got word earlier that one thing I had requested be released was too damaged to be taken out of preservation, so I was upset, because I’d planned on it being your birthday gift.”

He feels the anxiety dissipate at the same time as he feels a glimmer of hope, one that he’d been keeping alive for eight years, slowly fade out.

"It's not really even legible anymore, they showed me, and I told them to leave it in storage for the time being."

“The framed schematics,” he says more than asks.

Pepper stands, and looks down at him with a wistful expression, somewhere between regret and nostalgia. She doesn’t know why decades old napkin drawings mattered to him enough to have framed. Or mattered enough to pay an archival preservationist to try to restore them when he’d let all the other papers from that time fall apart after Stane's damages. But Pepper knows that they did matter, and even when the two of them were in some kind of relationship, she’d let them be a secret for him to hold onto.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. Jim finishes his coffee and exhales.

“Hey, don’t be, ok? Really. Thanks for thinking of it, means a lot,” he says. “Tell the folks there they can let it go, I'll keep paying for the other documents there to be maintained."

Pepper nods, slowly, as if she's unsure about it.

"I could to learn to embrace some new beginnings," he tells her.

She takes his empty cup and goes to leave, carefully moving a piece of paper out of the way with the stiletto of her Louboutin heel. Jim takes the cue, stands up and goes to start picking up the pages. They’re all contract legalese and design commission writeups for new solar cell glasswork on the side of the RLI campus outside of SoCal. Jim’s plan is to test the implementation there before redoing the other sites, since he can access grant money for eco-friendly design. He’s glad he’s seen the papers again, he feels re-energized. He's not who Stane wanted him to be, and it shows when he gets out of his own head enough to see it.

Pepper is paused, staring at the pages. Then she comes out of whatever her reverie is, and looks at him with the usual amount of exasperation.

“What?” he asks. “You’re off for the morning! Go find a nice brunch place, have a mimosa or two, live it up.”

“You have a meeting in an hour and a half, Jim. One which you _promised to not be late to_ , as you may recall. I can clean it up before I go, so long as you get your butt in gear for the board meeting.”

He praises her efficacy as she pushes him out of his office and into the penthouse’s open floor plan, and he goes to find some breakfast as she shuts the door on him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh, mystery~  
> What's on the napkins that Rhodey cares about so much?  
> Why was Pepper pausing?  
> What is the likelihood that paparazzi have gotten photos of Pepper and Rhodey leaving the Tower together, assumed they're back on romantically, and Tony will see this on a tabloid somewhere and buy it to hate-read later?
> 
> One of these is a trick question, lol. Of course Tony's gonna buy it, he hates the Daily Bugle as much as the next New Yorker, but it's a good picture of Rhodey, ok. He's got stubble and it's great. Tony appreciates the camerawork.
> 
> (Pepper tried her best, she really did.)


	6. in which Tony is played like a fiddle for his ability to cook, and also dispenses life advice because baby superheroes need emotional support

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for pancakes at 2 pm with kids you see yourself in way too much, and probably should try to encourage to not be a hot mess like you. Featuring Positive Nihilism(TM) and beef with philosophers as well as with carrot peelers.
> 
> Blobbert is not in this chapter, I'm sorry. Have a Spidey instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to Tony POV, definitely not dealing well with both a nightmare and having to tailor coping mechanisms to children, but he's not actively falling apart right this hot minute so yay for that I guess
> 
> So I haven't seen Homecoming, so this is just my own idea of this universe's Spidey. 
> 
> Uhhh this chapter might also need a "discussion of PTSD" type of warning thing. All discussions are pretty oblique, and non specific, but if you feel like i'm misrepresenting combat PTSD lemme know, and I'll swap things out for more generalized stuff.

“Hi, Mr J, do you have any _—_ ”

Tony wakes part-way to a face way too close to his own, and catapults into full wakefulness with a yell. It’s mid afternoon, looks like. Tony’s pretty sure he has pillow creases on his face.

“How are you, like, an actual adult, Mr. J?” Peter asks from the ceiling where he has retreated from Tony’s flailing.

“Very good question, how and why are you in my apartment?” Tony has pants on, that’s a good start, but he is shirtless so that’s less ideal. ”Did you bring me food?”

“No food, unless you pay me enough to go get some. I came in through the skylight again, duh.” He jerks a thumb to it, like Tony doesn’t know where his own skylight is. Possibly Drunken Tony has no idea, but no one has seen Drunken Tony in half a decade so Peter is just being redundant. Does Tony even have any shirts in his vicinity? In his whole apartment?

“I pay you plenty, kiddo,” Tony grumbles in his direction as he meanders to the closet. “Like child support, but for wayward youths who need to not break their damn necks. Also what the hell, I thought I told you to stop doing that, I have a buzzer.”

“Well since the taco trucks don’t recognize circuit boards as viable currency _—_ ” Peter starts, then switches gears. “Hey, I rang your buzzer like five times!”

“Lies and more lies, I am a light sleeper, I would’ve heard that.” 

“Oh, yeah, you kind of are. Huh. Maybe it’s broken?” Tony sees Peter coming down from off the ceiling now that the coast is clear, out of the corner of his eye.

“Ugh, again?” Tony mutters. His landlord is worse than he is at keeping track of problems. “Fine, I am making pancakes and you’re explaining what the heck you want, ya hooligan.”

“Are the pancakes for sharing?”

“Annnddd get out of my apartment, Parker.”

“No, I promise I’ll be good, please? You make really good pancakes. Like, super mad good. You eat them and think, clearly a really awesome person made these.”

“Haha, very funny. You’re already in a deficit of good behavior, so you gots to earn the pancakes.”

“Wait, ‘gots ta’? Are you from like, New Jersey or something? Are you disowned from the Italian mob? Is it for your hatred of pasta?” Peter scuttles up to perch on the lone kitchenette stool, like a mooch who believes he is getting _—_ what time is it actually, oh man it’s already five to two? _—_ two pm pancakes.

“You just used ‘mad’ as an extent modifier, you have no room for mockery in your sad little spider body, ok? Also pasta is fine, it’s ramen that’s gross,” Tony says through the cabinet door where he is getting some cinnamon and an unopened jar of lemon curd, why does he have that? He didn't buy that, he doesn't think. It's going in his face later.

“But are you, though?”

“No, I’m from, I dunno, Boston, if anything. Or from L.A. maybe, grew up in a few different places.” There’d better be eggs in that damn fridge. If not, it’s gonna be a job for the local spiderman, if said local spiderman expects to be fed.

“So the Irish mob? Wait, no...” Tony pokes his head out from the fridge.

“Kid, the mob _—_ any mob, by the way, including the theatre union guys _—_ doesn’t generally look kindly on non-Catholics.”

“Isn’t there a Jewish mob, though?” Peter has his mask off, the fool. Luckily for him, there are eggs. Ooh, and blueberries. Hot damn. He needs to thank Natalie, she’s so great. He’d change his locks on account of these two, but hey, free blueberries!

“Why do you assume I’m part of a mafia so easily? I do not look competent in any capacity, let alone organized crime.”

“That’s true, but I thought maybe it was a John Wick situation?”

“One, I don’t have a dog. Two, aren’t you far too young to see r-rated films? Three, why are you actually here? It’s not to tell me you think I’m a depressed hitman, which is rude.” 

"You have fish instead, and I’m not that young!”

“Peter.”

“I read the comics version, ‘cause _—_ ”

“Pete.” He shifts on his chair awkwardly, fiddling with the drawstring aglet of the hoodie he’s got on over his spiderman getup. Something’s wrong, Tony hates being pushy, but if he himself can’t be a miserable ostrich, no one gets to be. Modeling good emotional habits for the next generation, and all.

Which reminds him that he still needs to reply to Harley’s latest email. Why are there so many weird children that attach themselves to him? He is a nightmare, they should be imprinting on better people. People who have ambitions and shit.

“So, like, don’t be mad, ok?” Peter starts. 

"That bodes well, yep,” says Tony, taking a skillet off the wall. It has a post-it note stuck to it with curlicue handwriting in a red ink telling him to eat protein as well as sweets, because Natalie is aggressively concerned about his health. Bitch, meat’s expensive, she can spring for blueberries but not bacon? He needs to check if she used his ‘definitely not for scotch’ money in the cereal box, now that he thinks about it.

It is too quiet.

Tony looks back over at Peter, hunched in on himself in pre-teen agony. He looks like this guy with a slipped disc that Tony met some years back when he was still bumming around the Midwest. It can’t be comfortable, sitting like that, he muses.

“I promise that unless you killed a man or got an STI, I will not be angry.” Peter doesn’t laugh or look up. Well shit, that’s really not great. “If either of those things did happen, I will be angry but _also_ very impressed.”

“I broke a dude’s arm.”

“Huh. Did he merit getting his bones messed up?”

“It wasn’t while I was out doing Spider-man stuff. It was a guy at my school, it was sort of by accident.”

“Sounds like he sort of merited it, though?”

“I mean, yeah, he was harassing this girl and wouldn’t stop, but I broke his arm! And then got written up for it, and I haven’t told my aunt yet and I know she thinks I’m like, having trouble adjusting since my uncle died and tries to talk to me about drugs and mutant gene testing and I just don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“You can face the music and deal with your aunt, first off.”

“What, just be like, oh by the way I’m in trouble at school for breaking a classmate’s arm because, get this, I have super strength due to the fact I’m actually Spiderman!” Peter sounds like he’s five seconds from hysterics, and Tony is not equipped to handle this.

He's finished mixing the batter, and sets it aside on his cramped counter so he can lean back and make eye contact. This seems like a situation where eye contact helps, even if he’s the only one pulling his weight here.

“Maybe don’t lead with that, sure,” he says, “but you can tell her that you’re not involved in the usual trifecta of drugs, gangs, or felonies, and that this week you got into a fight because you’re having a lot of trouble managing how unfair the universe is sometimes, and you’re sorry and you’ll take your lumps because you want her to trust you and don’t like seeing her worry.”

Peter slumps down further into the abyss, like the freakishly bendy weirdo he is.

“That is a disturbing amount of spine curvature, right there, you wanna sit up and not freak out your extra-curricular guidance counselor with your youthful flexibility?”

“That is not your role in my life, sheesh,” Peter says, but he’s trying not to smile. Tony goes to turn the burner on for cooking pancakes.

“My uncle used to say that with great power comes great responsibility, but I feel like maybe it’s just that we call the people without the responsibility supervillains.”

“Is this a precursor talk to you planning on becoming a supervillain? Because then you have zero percent chance at pancakes.”

“No, I meant, like, people get power regardless of if they’re good people and it sucks.”

“That it does.”

“How do you know if you deserve superpowers if you don’t even know if you’re a good person? Like, how do you just not go crazy trying to not hurt people all the time?”

“I dunno, I think asking questions like that is a good place to start,” Tony says, slowly. “But it’s not like you get things because it’s what you deserve to have or receive, right? You get what the universe deals out, and it’s not like someone is calibrating how much you should have. The universe is infinite and doesn’t care about us.”

“Cheerful, Mr. J.”

“No, like in the Carl Sagan sense, where the other half of that coin is that we don’t owe the universe either. We fuck up? Universe is still expanding. We do good things? Same deal,” Tony points his spatula at Peter. “All we have is what we do. Superpowers or no, you have choices, right? So if nothing is owed to you and you get dealt a shitty hand, you have just as much right to be better and move forward as the next person, because the universe isn’t scoring you. If nothing you do matters, what you do is all that matters, and other zen phrases like that.”

“Thanks, Socrates.”

“Please tell me you know more than one philosopher and also that you are not comparing me to philosophers, when it was you who started this.”

“Uh, Plato?” Tony makes a _pthbt_ noise with his tongue. “Descartes. Yoda.”

“Closer but no. Renounce the hamartia of man attempting to understand the universe if you want pancakes, kid. Science only in this house. Apartment. Whatever.”

“I love science, just as much as I love pancakes.”

“Excellent. Play me like a fiddle.”

“So you’re not gonna take away my spidersuit for a morality lesson or anything, because we can all make our own choices, since the universe is unknowable. Right?”

“Hmm. I have the funny feeling that you’d get into just as much trouble without the suit as with. But I do have more protective features I want to add, so you can assist in that. You better have a change of clothes, by the way, we’re talking major mods to several pieces. I’m not typically keen on respecting authority _—_ ”

“ _Socrates_ ,” Peter mutters.

“ _—_ hush, you, but I’m more concerned with how you’re holding up being on the front lines of superhero-ing when you don’t feel like you’re sure of your own moral compass after breaking some arms.”

“Pretty sure arm breaking is a 'no' on the moral compass,” Peter says. Tony shrugs, because he's not convinced of that.

Tony has a nice stack of pancakes, now. On a clean plate, even. They have blueberries in them, and lemon curd in between the layers. Peter is struggling to stay focused since they smell amazing, because of course they do, Tony isn’t incompetent at chemistry.

“Part of you not owing the universe is the part where it’s not only you out there, ok? I am basically the last person to be giving you advice on this, but you don’t have to save the world everyday. You’re gonna feel like you do, because that’s part of being a superhero, seems like, but you don’t. Maybe somedays, but not all the time and not alone. Hell, even Iron Man has a team, right?”

Peter does look up at this. Trust Iron Man to surpass even the best pancakes in Parker excitement levels. It's fair, though. Iron Man is the best.

Peter has earned the pancakes, Tony figures, so he shlorps some questionably edible syrup onto them and hands the plate over to go find a fork.

“Did you.. I mean, you can tell me to shut up if it’s not ok to ask, but you had a team, right?”

Tony stares at the cutlery drawer. It is mostly empty. Who put a carrot peeler in here? He hasn’t bought an unpeeled carrot, possibly ever.

He turns again to Peter, who is weirdly intense for some reason. Probably scared of talking about it, like Tony hasn’t had years of practice at pretending he’s cool with strangers wanting to know what he can’t convey to them. Kids shouldn’t have to think about war, but the Battle of New York means most of them do, these days. Not that Tony knows bunches of children, only the ones that fall through the skylights or potato gun him down.

“In the desert? Yeah. I had a team, and it helped,” he says, handing over a fork that is missing a tine, but at least isn’t plastic. “You feel like it’s not just you going crazy, or slipping, or wanting to scream, it’s five to ten sad fucks with you screaming louder. It sucks being there of course but it’s not total isolation, even if the rest of the world is out of reach most of the time.”

Peter is admirably restraining himself from tearing into the pancakes. Tony goes back to finish up the batter, adds some more blueberries.

“It’s afterwards, when you have to pretend that things just go back to normal, that you really can’t do it alone. There’s no way. You can’t keep in it, and you can’t get it out, and everyone keeps thanking you, so everyone’s a stranger.” He turns the flame down, waits to rebutter the pan as Peter chews.

“I’m not saying it’s the same as the superhero thing, but it sounds like you go out and fight for truth, justice, and/or the American way on the weekends,and it's not glamorous or fun most of the time, and everyone expects you to go back to school and care about, I don’t know, social studies or prom or something, because they don’t know better.”

He bets Natalie doesn’t even peel her own carrots, what kind of bullshit is a carrot peeler anyway, in his damn cutlery drawer. You can drink carrots, you can get the baby cut ones, why is a metal blade necessary to have a carrot?

No, scratch that, Natalie would definitely take the opportunity to use more knives than is called for in any task. Russians, man.

“So you have two choices, right? Well, three, but door number three is not usually a sure bet because no believes I actually live here instead of my lab. One, you can stop doing so much, I’m not gonna say stop totally because I know you won’t. Two, you can stop doing it alone, you can tell a few people so that they do know better and can have your back so you don’t go apeshit on some classmate. Three, you can come here and get dubious wisdom from a mad scientist who mostly doesn’t take his own advice.”

He plates his own pancakes, lemon curd layered again, and decides a spoon is an acceptable alternative to washing a fork. It’s Saturday, he’s lazy.

“Now that we have had this depressing heart to heart, I’m gonna move on and avoid the topic of warfare for the foreseeable future. How’re your pancakes?”

Peter swallows. “Do you have a glass I could use for milk, or...?" He looks around, then back at Tony. "They’re fluffy and _awesome_ but if I eat too much I’ll get hiccups. Also I'll need to go get a change of clothes, and talk to Aunt May, so I might not be able to come back if I'm grounded."

Tony goes to get him a glass, the little punk, and mentally notes he’s making the one with the super strength carry the fishtank’s equipment on cleaning day from now on.

If Peter isn't grounded forever and ever, of course. Maybe his aunt is a reasonable lady who understands that some guys just need their arms busted, and if the universe isn't providing what is due, you take matters (arms) into your own hands.

None of Tony's glasses are clean, of course. He has to do dishes now, because the universe is sometimes a joke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My fave pancakes recipe, if you'd like, [can be found here.](http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/petes-scratch-pancakes-5170) I add fruit, and use spices according to what fruit i'm using (blueberry is cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, plus lemon curd as described in fic. Ideal syrup is earl grey, but not everyone makes syrup so do as you like.)


	7. in which Iron Man is a bamf with or without flying tin can suit, but would like to have his weekend back, thanks, please can he just not have to deal with this fuckery again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Instead of Civil War, have "we dealt with that like goddamn adults by going over the paperwork, and Iron Man hired a really good legal team to shut that ish down and also Steve lost his temper on national television."
> 
> Don't fuck with the Avengers, Ross. It's a bad idea. AKA Let's Retgone Civil War and Ultron, yayyyyy!
> 
> (The unrelated thing with the tank and the charity carwash and the Iron Girls will live in infamy.)

He’s very nearly late to his meeting, and he’s definitely a bit more towards grizzled on the ‘definable jawline’ to ‘completely hidden lower half of face’ scale than Pepper would like him to be, but it’s not a nightmare.

No, the nightmare is when they’ve all shaken hands, the various members of the Board of Trustees that more or less run the for-profit sector of RLI-Tech have departed, and Jim’s patting himself on the back for not face-planting into his papers or firing a pulsar beam into White Guy Dave’s mediocre mouth after he implied that RLI would never be as profitable for shareholders as when it was an arms dealer.

As he’s strolling out towards the glass walkway bridge that separates the private executive areas from the exhibit and demo rooms, idly texting Pep for Dave’s level of necessity for the Board or company as a whole, Jim rather literally runs into Li Jing “but I also go by Hannah, if that’s too hard, I mean, not that it’s hard for you, I mean, just in case”, the part-time receptionist on duty today.

She looks like she’s either composing her last will and testament for the firing squad, or is praying for the stress to kill her first. She doesn’t normally look this ready to puke by his presence alone, so Jim is immediately on high alert, running through the roster of security and who’s on site today for possible damage control as he helps steady her with a hand on her shoulder.

Jim doesn’t bother to smile reassuringly at her, it never works for the junior receptionists. Plus he’s pretty sure she’ll actually faint if he smiles at her. It’s a curse, being this stunningly handsome, wealthy, and smart. Or it’s the wrinkled tie and caffeine withdrawal setting in.

Jim would like a nap.

“I’m so so sorry, Dr. Rhodes, they wouldn’t wait, it’s General Ross and he was very insistent to see you but I told him the policy and he says this is more important, and I asked if I can have information to brief you, but he yelled at me and Sarah, and he wouldn’t listen and now he’s coming here and I don’t know what to do so I took the back route to reach you first even though I don’t have clearance yet, but I don’t know what he wants _—"_

Jim wishes he’d listened to Pepper telling him to shave this morning as Li Jing tells him how she is so sorry she couldn’t keep the US Army’s five star and noted battle tank downstairs to wait for him. Jim squeezes her shoulder, and she stops to draw in a shaky breath. Her eyes are still wet, but she seems to suddenly realize he’s touching her and a bit of the star-struck look comes back onto her face. Jim lets go of her shoulder.

“It’s fine, Li Jing, why don’t you go back to the front desk? I can handle it from here. Thank you for your quick thinking to get here, but in the future, you can just get Binan or Jessica to call me to let me know.”

“Um, they’re off? Today?” she says, earnest but less terrified than before, eyes darting at the exits and back to his face. “Because of the, um, the visit with the Wakanda _—_ ”

“Right, yes, of course. I’ll take it from here,” he says to her.

She practically teleports away, and Jim texts Bruce (and by extension, Natasha) a few strings of codes. Emergency evacuation if they’re at the Labs, Jim’s running interception, Ross, get to the Tower, or if the RLI campus is under siege, get to lockdown and alert the team. Then he deactivates his phone, and checks his watch. It’s not even lunchtime, the dick.

He sees General Thaddeus Ross and Company headed across his walkway like fucking Caesar at the Rubicon. But there is no empire at the other side, just a pissed off, extremely rich asshole who’s done this before, and is tired of playing the game.

Shiny medals and shinier boots are blazing in the sunlight, and Jim’s ready to spit tacks already. Ross is the worst kind of higher-up, decorated and by the book, the delusional prophet screaming to the false gods of his own belief in American Exceptionalism. Party faithful down to the core.

Jim was like that, once. His spine is mostly metal and synthetic spinal cord as a result, and while Jim hides that part of his life from his public identity, it must show in his metaphorical backbone enough that Ross is resorting to a cheap B&E. With flair on full display for the intimidation factor, and a cigar in hand since the grunts flanking him aren’t Freudian enough. Jim wishes he’d brought along some of what Tony likes to call “ribbon salad” in the hopes of messing with him, just to add to the pissing contest.

Jim inhales, schools his face into carefully crafted blankness, and goes to dance with the devil.

“General, what brings the Army’s finest over today? Just for a reminder of RLI’s non-smoking policies?” He strolls up, smiling affably, arms crossed over his chest.

“Lieutenant Colonel, cut the crap,” Ross says, cigar back in mouth. Jim keeps smiling as he stands in the middle of the bridge. He hopes his posture is channeling a muted form of the ‘wish a bitch would’ anger he’s keeping on lockdown.

“Sir, I assure you I take the pulmonary health of my employees and visitors very seriously. We have regular school tours here, as I’m sure you are aware.”

Someone in Ross’ group coughs to cover a laugh, near the back. That’s interesting. Jim watches a vein begin to rise on Ross’ forehead, wonders how much he can get away with before he’s legally obligated to offer medical assistance. Ross, predictably, barrels onward.

“I have an order that allows me to take Dr. Banner into the military’s custody, Colonel, and I will not have you standing in my way again.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, General,” Jim says, not moving an inch from his stance directly in front of the bull. “Please do put out the cigar, though. An ashtray can be found at the perimeter of the secure area outside RLI.” Ross narrows his eyes, and now a few of his men at the rear of the group are covering their smiles or looking around to mask amusement. The same person in the back coughs again.

“I mean, someone back there needs a gig with more concern for lung health, clearly,” Jim points out, which doesn’t help matters.

They stare at each other in silence, Jim perfectly bland to Ross’ tight jawline.

“Well? Where the devil is he?”

“How would I know? It’s a Saturday, you know how it is, private sector employees not required be at their place of employment 24/7 thanks to those pesky labor laws,” Jim replies, still smiling like he’s having a grand old time. “Even the best lobbyists can’t get around those regulations.”

Ross should really see a doctor about that vein weakening, Jim notes as he sputters in response to lack of immediate acquiescence, and he continues.

“And I’ll mention that as you’re in a toxin-sensitive facility, I’d hate to have to charge the Army for any replacement equipment.” A few eyebrows in the front raise at that, and the back quiets down real fast at the hint of things getting serious. Jim’s pretty certain that the extra contingent was press-ganged into this event for a show of force, but he’s still USAF in their eyes and no one’s putting up with insults to the Army from a decommissioned flyboy.

Ross nearly howls in rage, right on cue. “You will do no such thing, you have no grounds to even consider _—_ ”

“Because I’m sure that you’d only be here under direct orders, and thus on the clock, General,” Jim says, quietly and evenly over the hot air directed his way. “And therefore any actions you are taking are on behalf of the orders given, and held accountable to the Army and your superiors, who know what is acceptable conduct in a high-level research facility within their chain of supply, and the financial risks of an unannounced visit to said facility.”

It’s dead quiet in the walkway bridge. Ross is formulating how to respond without jeopardizing the assumption that he’s here on the Army’s ticket, which Jim doubts he has full approval for stating outright. Ross’ loyalists look unsure how to proceed. The peanut gallery may have swung back around to rooting for Jim, it’s not clear yet.

The trouble with throwing your weight around, Jim thinks, is you’ve got to aim correctly. Ross is the type to think hitting a barn door with a tank is applicable, but these days he has cronies to get up to no good on paper.

Ross tries another tack. “Now look here, _son—_ ”

“Last I was aware, _Pops_ , Dr. Banner is cleared to work and reside in this country under the advisory commission of SHIELD. I’ve heard nothing to the contrary from either the Joint Council or SHIELD, are you telling me your orders directly contravene this clearance?”

Jim keeps his tone mild, in contrast to the stress headache he’s got starting. His back is straight in the silence of the walkway. He can feel his watch, trapped between his bicep and ribcage, inaudibly vibrating. He mourns for his once-potential nap that is not to be.

“And if so, why was RLI given no update on changes to Banner’s clearance, or warning if there had been infractions committed that led to that decision being overwritten? I was under the impression that RLI was in good standing, and as per the procedures outlined in the revised Accords, needed to be informed in writing if there was any cause for,” Jim pauses to let Ross’ brain supply the actual, harsher, wording, “extra-judicial measures in light of provable offenses.”

Jim notes which of the flanking officers look like they understood the dig at Ross, and which look like they haven’t actually read the full Accords, after a couple million dollars worth of several very good lawyers’ concerted effort to revise the legalese. He hasn’t forgotten what Ross nearly managed to achieve, hasn’t forgotten the look on Wanda Maximoff’s face as Natasha translated the document for her in a tight voice, Bruce with his eyes shut and hands clenched. Trying to translate the words for a fucking underwater vault, because Ross is incapable of humanity.

(The live press conference where Steve punched Ross in the face, ranted for a full ten minutes on the importance of due process and the Bill of Rights to make America something something eagles freedom the meaning of patriotism, and then apologized to the public for undue violence even when deserved, is in Jim’s top ten ‘Steve Rogers Is Unreal and It’s Amazing’ moments. Not number one, ‘cause of the thing with the tank and the charity carwash and the Iron Girls, but it’s up there.)

“But I’m sure you have in fact followed the proper procedures to document a provable offense,” says Jim merrily, “and so you are of course free to submit your paperwork detailing what regulations Banner is under to RLI’s main office for our perusal. I’m sure our legal team will appreciate the overtime pay, they’ve been starved of attention as of late. Give my regards to the Army, gentlemen and women and variations thereupon, I’m heading to lunch.”

“As if you affect the Army anymore,” one of the khaki-suited cronies snaps. Jim widens his smile, knows he should let it drop. Mediocre Dave from this morning isn’t the only one who thinks RLI isn’t worth much without weaponry, but Dave was at least _polite_ about being wrong.

“Oh? That’s a new development, I’m sure the Corps of Engineers, the Army's research labs, and the 5 NGOs working in tandem with the scientific goals of the Army that I met with this past week for the conference on US and Wakanda research exchange would be very interested to learn the news,” Jim says, unable to help himself. “Am I freed of all my obligations financially to the Army as well? Can I have that in writing for when I’m accused of stealing the 5-point-9 billion odd in funds we just negotiated for this coming fiscal year? Not all of us can simply make off-soil labs with limited oversight on ethics, some of us play by the rules when it comes to research.”

That sets Ross off again, about how he has his orders, now give him Banner. Jim knows it’ll bite him in the ass eventually to poke at Ross like that, but the Hulk wouldn’t exist without Ross’ playground of a fucking nuclear plant, or his insistence on super-soldier tech, even after Blomsky’s burnout and the resulting Accords debacle that Jim curses about on a weekly basis. So Ross can deal with a bit of discomfort; his unsuccessful-thanks-to-Steve bid for Secretary of State should have taught him humility if nothing else. Clearly didn’t teach him subtlety.

Jim lets Ross wear himself out, checks his watch again. Ross finally stops, indignant and red faced. A few of the guys in the peanut gallery look actively alarmed, or their eyes have glazed over in the way of grunts the world over who are unable to leave parade rest until the officer is gone. Some fuckery is just universal.

“Gentlemen, this is counter-productive,” Jim says. “How about you get your written orders to my office, following a legally-defensible protocol such as contacting us during standard business hours, and go enjoy your weekends?”

“Are you obstructing my team from following our orders?” Ross is practically screaming in impotent rage, it’s great.

“Oh, no, just remind me what that was again? Something about Banner?” The epidemic of coughing returns, and Ross actually does scream. Pepper is going to kill him when she gets back, and then Director Fury is going to kill him twice. Jim is not good at being well-behaved. He hasn’t punched Ross yet, though, that must count for something.

Oh well. Looks like it’s just gonna be one of those days where Jim considers supervillainy and nothing gets accomplished beyond keeping his enemy roster well-stocked.

He really should have eaten more for breakfast, because he's gonna miss lunch at this rate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey here's the rest of what I posted as a bonus for chapter 6!
> 
> Jim's disabled in this AU, but that may or may not be gone into in more detail later, depends what I'm up to with it. (Astolat has a great tony/rhodey fic about Rhodey's spine and associated nerve issues, if y'all'd like to read that! It is explicit, but accounts for spine damage in a hilarious manner and that makes me pleased.)


	8. in which a super spy watches her coworkers eat their combined weight in lebanese & greek takeout and bitch at each other

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Iron Dad is very disappointed in you right now, Avengers. Not you, Wanda.  
> Natasha has a bad feeling about this. No, not the mezze platter.
> 
> AKA:  
> The tension increases, the plot thickens, oh man I really want souvlaki now.

Rhodes shows up halfway through dinner with Pepper in tow. Dinner itself is several mezze platters from a local hole in the wall that Natasha had stopped by en route to the Tower. There’s no chicken roti, grape leaf rice, or hummus left, but she figures that if he wants any of those, he can figure out his own solution.

Yinsen, all too happy to be kidnapped from work, is staring at the miniature chessboard across from Bruce, deep in concentration. Bruce is knitting next to where Clint perches on the edge of the obscenely luxurious lounge nook set into the floor. Clint is eyeing the shared teapot with the facial expression of a man weighing the extent of his post-mezze thirst against his dislike of jasmine. Lucky is flopped down against him and begging for scraps from a wavering Steve. Wanda is delicately chewing on a wrap she has dumped half of a bottle of hot curry pepper into and is watching her teammates with undisguised amusement. She has also decimated the olive selection, removing the pits magically with a motion of her slim fingers.

Rhodes descends the nook’s steps and proceeds to vacuum up leftovers like it’s a competition, while Pepper settles in by Natasha and pets the newly-distracted Lucky, to Steve’s clear gratitude. She figures Rhodes hasn’t eaten properly in the past week, wonders if she can get Fury to come over for pizza and heart-to-hearts at some point. Or if Coulson feels up to some tough love, but he’s raising a herd of top secret ducklings now so who knows when he’ll be around next.

“The usual suspects and the usual results?” asks Bruce, after a while. Rhodes rolls his eyes and hums agreement around a mouthful of saffron noodles, reaching for a mostly empty tub of stuffed grape leaves.

“I assume you’ve filled in everyone already,” says Pepper, now removing her heels, “but just in case, we’re initiating legal action against Ross on Dr. Banner’s behalf so that this stops happening.”

Even Yinsen looks up at this, eyebrows to his hairline, and Natasha doesn’t even need to look to know Steve’s jaw is clenching. The fake Doom-bots have resurfaced again, and with the team split for the various Wakanda and Asgard negotiations, everyone’s feeling the strain. This is the last thing they all need, the press is going to be ruthless when they find out they have a new angle to probe.

“Dr. Rhodes didn’t mention that to us, no,” Bruce says lightly, as Pepper turns to glare at her boss, “but I’m way too tired of the constant upheavals in dealing with Ross to think of other solutions right now.”

“Probably won’t lead to anything substantive, again,” says Clint. “Since Steve is only allowed one facepunch per congressional season.” Wanda silently gets up next to him with food in hand, resting her head on a broad shoulder. He slings an arm around her easily, letting her nestle into his side further.

“As they say, Dr. Rhodes, a good offense,” Yinsen says, picking up his teacup. Rhodes turns to stare at him as if he has just now realized his head of R&D is drinking tea with the rest of the team. She had responded to his earlier alert with her plans, but it seems he has yet to get up to speed. Natasha files that away as Yinsen continues. “Much as it’s not your or Dr. Banner’s M.O., it may be wisest to stop letting the opposition set the pace.”

“I’d resent the implications if I didn’t resemble that remark,” Bruce says wearily. He’s smiling but it’s the grim smile of a man fighting a war of attrition, and losing _—_ neither Bruce nor his bigger counterpart are made for siege warfare. Non-Soviets in general aren’t, and scientists in particular are ill-suited to non-academic hostilities, with one cranky Iron exception. (Maybe two.)

Rhodes comes up for air from the boxes of carry-out. “RLI’s handling the legal side, so the team can choose to either offer no comment when asked individually, or refer to a statement for the team as a whole,” he starts, but gets cut off by Steve.

“That’s not gonna hold up forever, though, even if we do another press conference on this,” he says, running a hand through his hair.

“Like any of us have the time for a presser,” grumbles Clint. “General Thunderfuck’ll just run his own smear campaign like always, and we’ll have to bench Hulk and Banner until Rhodes throws enough money at the whole mess to reset the scales.”

“Not helping, Clint,” Steve interjects. Wanda is using magic to bring the olives over, not looking up.

“Iron Man, we should have conferred on this before you went that route with Ross, we need to have a plan beyond buying time with legal proceedings, and now we’re behind on options.”

“Options?” says Pepper, ice in her tone and sheer exhaustion in her eyes. “We didn’t have options when Ross did this the first time, and it was RLI’s legal team that gave the Avengers the leeway to negotiate off that ledge, if I recall.”

“Whole lotta fucking leeway it got us _—_ ”

“Barton, can it. Miss Potts, that’s not my point, we needed to be informed ASAP _—_ "

“This _is_ ASAP, do you know how long we were dealing with the lab shut-down due to Ross’ armed attaché _—_ ”

It’s like watching a train begin to derail in slow motion, knowing the sparks are just waiting for a hint of tinder. Clint makes a show of turning off his ears and eating Wanda’s hovering olives, Yinsen looks incredibly uncomfortable to be involved at all, Bruce rubs at his brow as Steve and Pepper get into it.

Rhodes sets down his fork, and stands up.

The train wreck pauses in mid-air. Natasha has no idea how he’s learned it so perfectly, but Rhodes can turn the full weight of his presence on or off at a second’s notice. She never really forgets he can do so, per se, but she never can figure out what trips the transformation from team member to The Invincible Iron Man. Bruce might know a bit more, having messed around with Rhodes enough to get closer than anyone else, except possibly Pepper.

Bruce thankfully has resumed his knitting, Natasha notes. If she’s honest about it, which is rare, she finds Rhodes’ switch worse than his _—_ only one is an anomaly in the predictive matrices she builds around herself.

“Pep, why don’t you go and chum the sharktank, get 'em started on a statement for the team before you take a few days off,” he says, signing for Clint’s benefit, slow and mechanical. She looks like she’s ready to punch him, right after she gets Steve, but he turns to her fully, and something in his face gets her to relent and pick up her heels to go with a sigh. He turns back.

“Rogers, let’s go over what the situation is at present and notify the team once we’ve got a shorter version to brief them on.” Steve nods assent, looking somewhat shamefaced at Rhodes’ taking the lead, or nearly yelling at ladies, or whatever the hell the weird Cap and Iron Man dynamic is up to now.

“Hawkeye, check in with Steve after we’re done, because I want your input on the longer term strategy for where we need to allocate what resources going forward. You’ve been involved in all the different parts of the action lately, and we need to know the lay of the land before I get my millions aimed to fire.” Barton, for his part, does not look even slightly ashamed whatsoever, just salutes jauntily and pulls a stray piece of garlic naan out of Lucky’s range.

“Widow,” Natasha feels her eyebrow raise in silent judgement, she has done nothing wrong today, she even saved him the good noodles from his hungry teammates, “get Fury involved and up to speed, and see when he or his envoy can get here to hash this out with the team. I’m not happy with Ross sideswiping SHIELD to get to the Hulk, and I’m betting he’ll want that on his radar at the very least.”

Well, that’s two birds with one stone then, Natasha muses as she gets her phone out, shifting over to press her own legs against the mute and withdrawn Wanda’s knees.

“Dr. Banner, Dr. Ho, I’ll leave you to your chess match. Wanda?” Rhodes uses explicitly her more fluid name sign instead of the W signed as “red” of her call name. Clint looks between them, momentarily confused, another thing that Natasha files away for reference _—_ he didn’t teach Rhodes that.

Wanda scrubs a hand over her eyes, and drags her gaze up to meet his. Natasha is fairly certain that Wanda knows how much every last Avenger would sacrifice on her behalf, how much she personally would do to keep her safe, but that knowledge doesn’t help the mindset much when you come from the bloc via forced military experiments. Natasha resolves to get more aggressive in getting Wanda a therapist from here on in, as Rhodes continues.

“I clearly got here way too late to get any of the good stuff _—_ ” Natasha is appalled at his bald faced lies, to young and impressionable teens no less, but Wanda breathes out a wet giggle, so she lets it go.

“ _—_ but if I order another roti platter or souvlaki, are you gonna share that hot sauce or do I have to fight you for it?”

Wanda stares at him, narrowing her eyes, and then proceeds to chug the bottle out of spite, as Clint loses it to laughing, Lucky barking excitedly as the tension drains away fully. Yinsen and Bruce are hiding smiles behind their teacups, Steve looks mock-horrified (and somewhat actually queasy), and Pepper, by the door, laughs outright. Rhodes saunters over to say something to her, Lucky chasing after him as Clint begins to hiccup from where he’s sprawled on the floor next to Wanda.

As Bruce and Yinsen implore him to drink tea to stop the hiccups, Natasha watches the easy line of Rhodes’ back, and knows that something is very, very wrong. She looks over at Steve, but he’s exhausted from fake Doom-bot wrangling and doesn’t seem to have picked up on it, too grateful to have Iron Man step in to lead.

She texts Fury’s direct line, technically a number that is above her clearance level but they hired her for a reason so he should expect this by now or he’s not her boss for much longer.

 _We’ve got a nightmare headed our way, Lil Nemo_.

 _Be there soon, dreamcatcher_ , he sends back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nat Chapter!!!
> 
> Happy Whatever Yu Want, my O key is brken nw (thanks laptp!!) and I wrk retail this time f year, s here's a lil gift frm me t yu. I wanted t d a Hannukah chapter pst but alas, I was wrking mst f that time.
> 
> if yu wanna pay me back, just be nice t retail wrkers, kids! Sme f us wrk until 6pm Christmas Eve. yay.


	9. in which there is reminiscing and lovesickness, a missing pen, and deleted text messages.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim heads home and thinks about things. Possibly overthinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've been dead on my feet so far thanks to IRL shenanigans, have some past history and present regrets courtesy of one James "Rhodey" Rhodes.

This guy is so drunk, thinks Jimmy. Neither of them, nor anyone at this party aside from the newly arrived groups that seem to constantly show up to crow at each other, is sober, but this guy is really hitting the bottle hard. Jimmy knows that some kids that are away from home for the first time dive into the party scene. He maybe thinks this isn’t that, this is something else, something darker, but he’s just met this guy so who knows.

He’s just met this guy, but he’s already concerned about him, go figure.

Jim tries to ease the cup away from him, sneakily, but the little shit is sharp as a tack and clutches it tighter. It sloshes out on them both, icy and sour and fruit scented. Then he’s turning betrayed puppy dog eyes on Jim, like it wasn’t a drink this guy stole from a stranger in front of Jimmy and everyone, and it’d be comic or maybe pathetic if Mystery Guy wasn’t right up next to him on the dingy couch, with his insanely long eyelashes, and the sort of curly disheveled hair isn’t helping, either. Jim can feel their pulses are both high, getting higher. The guy’s lips are shiny and plump, and then he swallows, slowly.

Jim looks away, chiding him and pretending it’s for the spill, knocking an elbow into the guy’s ribs through his shirt and trying not to grin at getting stabbed with a cold finger in return.

Jimmy doesn’t have doubts about his own sexuality, exactly, he knows he’s up for a good time regardless of apparatus, but there’s not enough alcohol in his system to mute the disembodied voice telling him that being seen having a not-straight time with a random student on the first weekend of school is a bad idea. The voice sounds like his father, and Jimmy hates himself a little for sitting up to get napkins to mop up the drink instead of getting closer. Sure, there’s no paparazzi in the bushes upstairs on the frat row lawn waiting to document the parties in the off chance of getting shots of the young and promising Junior letting the family legacy down, hell, his dad’s fame isn’t really that kind of famous any more, but that isn’t what Jimmy’s worried about. People always talk.

He tells himself that Mystery Guy is too wasted to be up for anything, that he’s not a scumbag who takes advantage of cute drunk white boys that are probably being cuddly because of the, what is that, gin? A screwdriver? Wasn’t this guy drinking a beer when he came over and sat down to expound on some drunken point? Jim pities his hypothetical roommate, as Mystery Guy grabs the napkins from his hand and pats them down on their thighs with earnest, exaggerated caution.

Point is, the guy needs some water, and Jimmy tells him so when the puppy dog eyes dial up to break the meter with an honest-to-God pout when he starts to get up again. Mystery Guy offers the nearly-empty cup back as a pointless token of drunk bargaining, begging him to stay with grandiose gestures of his hands. It sounds good, too good, to listen to that kind of thing coming from him, almost teasing in how breathless the guy is, how his eyes follow him. Jimmy tells him to stay put and not keep drinking, and he’ll be back with the water in a second. He’s fully prepared to return to the guy passed out or wandered off, but he could use some ice water himself.

Mystery Guy grabs for his shirt in desperate glee, his eyes dark and sparkling, but comes away with Jimmy’s dumb fucking expensive pen instead. It’s mother of pearl and dark steel grey, and useless. Damn it, now Jimmy’s gonna have to hunt this drunk white boy down to reclaim it so his favorite aunt doesn’t know her gift is missing, because Therese will definitely ask. He doesn’t mind the idea as much as he should. A non-drunk Mystery Guy might be a different situation than this crowded frat’s game-room party. A better one.

Jimmy needs to go get that ice water about five minutes ago. Some fresh air, some not getting turned on by this whole bizarre deal, the usual. The guy can’t even be old enough for this kind of wasted, or else he’s a babyface and then some.

He tells Mystery Guy to draw him something cool, praying it’ll keep him occupied long enough to return with something to distract him and regain the pen. Jimmy has baby cousins, he figures it’s more or less the same concept where they can only hold one thing at a time. At least this guy won’t try to eat it, or chew on it. He hopes. Mystery Guy starts going through his pants pockets, looking for something to write on, probably. Maybe he will eat Jimmy’s pen after all. He’s already put it in his fucking ridiculous mouth, and Jimmy isn’t looking at the way his lower lip slides and catches on the pen clasp, slack-jawed and drunkenly focused on the task at hand.

Jimmy grabs him some napkins for scrap paper, supervises the beginning of the drawing process, futilely reminds him not to leave, and tries to get up the stairs to where he thinks the kitchen was as quickly as possible.

He runs into some other guys he knows from other well-to-do east coast families and from the past few years at the head of his classes, has to stop and talk to them, gets sucked into dumb conversations for what feels like forever until he can finally make it to the kitchen and pour two cups of water. Both are for Mystery Guy, since Jimmy has the intuition that he’s either found a new drink or plans to get one. There’s a jar of pencils and a pad of note paper by the phone, and he digs around to find a Bic to borrow. Hey, he needs his pen back but there’s no reason not to let Mystery Guy keep drawing. At least a plastic pen isn’t the worst thing to let him chew on, frat germs notwithstanding.

He makes it to the stairwell after snagging a beer and clapping a few people on the shoulder to escape another round of meaningless conversation. He yields one of the cups water to a girl with glazed eyes and no rhythm as she dances, and finally clears the stairs. Once he’s back downstairs, he practically struts over to Mystery Guy, pen in hand, who immediately zeros in on the beer from where he’s curled up into the couch corner. Jimmy pointedly finishes it off, then tosses it into the trashcan by the pool table, and hands over the the cup of water.

Mystery Guy jokes that he wasn’t sure if Jim was coming back or was really just a figment of his imagination in the first place, but sets the original pen down, to Jimmy’s relief. Jim’s got the pen back and swapped out for the Bic when the Mystery Guy throws back the cup of water and starts making noises that should be inappropriate, if not actually illegal, in appreciation. Jimmy tries not to watch the long line of the guy’s neck, adam’s apple bobbing in time to the gulps he’s taking. Water is slowly dripping down from the side of his mouth, tracing over his lower lip to hit his chin, which would be sad in any other context but somehow makes it feel too crowded again. Jim leans over to look at the drawings, trying for an eyeroll but failing to make it stick.

After another ridiculous groan that is the loudest yet, he tells Mystery Guy not to hurt himself; he knows water is a new concept and all, but really, and Mystery Guy nearly chokes in startled laughter. A bunch of water goes everywhere, but they both grab at the napkins covered in ink to save them from damage. Mystery Guy stares up at him reverently for this action, lips slightly parted in awe, and Jimmy raises an eyebrow, wondering how much self-control he can dredge up and for how much longer, until Mystery Guy starts coughing again. He sits down and thumps him on the back for good measure, but is shrugged off, only to find an arm thrown around his shoulders.

The guy is still clearly drunk as he proclaims them to be united in their love of science, and Jim is debating how annoyed to be in response to the sudden closeness and touching, and then he actually sees the drawings, and it’s like the whole universe narrows down to the two of them and the arm of the sofa, and stands still. Jimmy doesn’t think he’s breathing properly.

It’s a fucking jet engine, drawn perfectly technically sound and crisp over 4 wrinkled, stained napkins. He’d think it was copied, but it’s not like any design he’s seen before. It’s using Jimmy’s father’s reactor technology, but what isn’t these days, and it has modifications that seem to bend the laws of physics, yet somehow Jimmy’s sure there’s a logic to it. It’s unbelievably precise for what’s clearly from memory in—he checks his watch as Mystery Guy proceeds to lose it when he realizes on the couch next to him—less than half an hour. What the hell is this? Who is this guy?

Jimmy knows he’s staring as Mystery Guy settles into delighted giggles. He asks him about one of the modifications. Mystery Guy drunkenly starts explaining jet propulsion, like Jimmy hasn’t been engineering since he was able to grasp a drafting pencil. He lets him ramble on in surprisingly concise summary of thrust, complete with innuendo, because it’s nice to not have someone know who he is and where he comes from, for once. To assume he’s just another whiz kid, maybe not in engineering at all, to treat him like it’s a goddamn pleasure to introduce to the laws of the universe. Jimmy finally stops him when he starts losing his train of thought, asks about the modification in more technical terms.

He has a really gorgeous smile and is some kind of insane genius, he thinks in a daze as Mystery Guy nearly collapses in laughter and delightedly accuses Jimmy of holding out on him.

A few minutes before they all get kicked out to wander off to their respective dorms or possibly even colleges, Boston’s got enough schools to make it confusing, Jimmy asks Mystery Guy to sign the napkins, promises to attribute it equally when they get arrested on the first invisible jet plane joyride. The pile has grown to 15 napkins, as the design evolved and expanded and was in closer proximity to drinks than it should have been. Mystery Guy does a double take, and jokes that Jimmy should really know who he is by now. Jimmy is amused by the irony of this, but then again rich white boys always seem to think that of themselves.

Mystery Guy signs with a flourish, having regained Jimmy’s pen at some point, and Jimmy is nearly tempted to ask him to put his number down too, but then they’re being ushered out and it’s chaos, and he loses sight of Mystery Guy, but it’s fine because he’ll look up if he shares any classes with one Anthony Stark, name doesn’t ring any bells, tomorrow.

He needs the damn pen back, too.

 

Jim thumps his head back against the elevator wall en route to his penthouse suite, some thirty odd years later, and reflects that he never did get his pen back. He regrets a lot in his life, but here he is, friends with Tony again. Maybe he could do the whole fresh start thing like he told Pepper, but he can’t help feeling like he wants to be back there, to where they were young and nameless and drawn together by unknown circumstance.

He pulls out his RLI phone to text the miscreant in question, writes a few messages, deletes each one after typing instead of sending it.

 _My aunt still wants to know what I did with that pen, any hints?_  
_Hey Tony, you better still have my pen now that_  
_Hey Tony, you still owe me a pen, y’know_  
_Hey, remember back in undergrad when_  
_Hey, don’t know if you remember back in MIT but we_  
_Hey, do you remember being at_  
_I wanted to_

With each rewrite, Jim watches the floor number increase on the elevator panel until he gives up and settles on a different, lesser topic to start with.

_Hey, you suffering without access to a sweet lab set-up?_

He shakes his shoulders out, tries again.

_Ready to get back to the mad science yet? Nat said you got home ok for the weekend, but I don’t think she was joking when she said you’d be going stir crazy in under a day._

The elevator keeps going up, and Jim tells himself if Tony doesn’t see the text by the time it hits the penthouse, he’ll delete it.  
  
He’ll move on.

Tony probably did, definitely moved forward either way.

Two floors from the top, his phone buzzes with Tony’s reply, then again with another.

 _Me, stir-crazy? Surely you jest. I am as zen as the esteemed Dr. Banner._  
_On the good weed, even._

Jim hides a real smile under his palm. God, he’s still so fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jeez, Tony was a hot mess. So glad everyone is super mature adults now that talk about their feelings, right? Right?


	10. in which an apartment is cleaned and a man tests his lemon curd eating capabilities while musing on hubris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The working title for this chapter was "Tony is being dumb and boring, take one thousand" and then subtitled "You wouldn't be a Greek Tragedy if you weren't so damn extra."
> 
> Have some angst. Next chapter has angst and porn, so like, enjoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHO IS HYPE FOR BLACK PANTHER????????  
> NEXT WEEK Y'ALL LET'S GO LET'S DO THIS THING!
> 
> I'm so frigging ready for the movie of the century, for the radical impact on SF/F/Speculative Fiction and actual real world technology that this film is gonna usher in a la Star Trek, for the MINDBLOWING EXPERIENCE that this film is gonna be for so many adults and kids. 
> 
> Also I am making a hat. It has cat ears and I'm embroidering gold or purple metallic thread onto it in the mask/crown design. I'm maybe really pumped for this y'all.

By 9pm, Tony figures his ersatz child has been grounded and won’t be web-swinging back to his apartment any time soon. Or else Peter is avoiding the come-to-jesus talks with his aunt and is in hiding, a spider on the lam, and also isn’t going to show up what with being a fugitive or whatever. Peter can text him if he’s planning to return, but Tony’s got other things to do.

He’s cleaned up a good portion of the mess in a burst of listless boredom and dissociative productivity, with a few detours to redesign the lamp attachment for the tank and other little mechanical odds and ends. He’s emailed no less than three people today, and did all the exercises he could manage. The kitchenette floor and counter practically sparkles. He’s vacuumed, and he never wants to do it again.

So much mysterious crunching, so much.

Nat used to badger him about a cleaning service, and he’d reply with inquiries as to the clearance level of the average housekeeper, but as he looks over the milkcrate of an abode he tentatively calls his own, he figures she needs to “put some respect on his name,” as Princess Shuri had said in an interview when asked about her regal brother.

Tony is 100% not over how cool she is. He’d collect her press releases too, but he only has so much room to stash his geekery. Plus, he can’t imagine sharing the tank stand’s inner sanctum. It’d be like cheating on his Science Crush. Or his regular crush. Whatever. Also it’d be weird since the Princess seems kinda young. Rhodey mentioned she was in her teens. Tony’s not actually sure what her age is, come to think of it. He’s never gotten close enough to gauge in person, she’s literal royalty, but he did mistakenly think T’Challa was in his late teens for the longest time. Does Wakanda use a different calendar system, like a base 30 or something? Maybe they just always look that good.

He looks it up on his phone, unfolding the slim pop out keyboard to type into the search bar. It’s an earlier model of the tessellating Iron Man armor incorporated into the phone chassis, far simpler than the real deal, but Tony shelled out good money for it. It’s cool and looks like a high end sports car, what can he say. He knows what he likes in design features, and having the phone means strangers on the subway stop assuming he’s schizophrenic, so that’s also good. He scrolls past the mindless news coverage of the anti-Wakandan visit protests that got shut down for being dumb and full of neo-nazis who don’t like joy to exist in the universe, their loss.

Yeah, she’s 16, according to the BBC articles from her recent appointment to Official Head of Tech Dev or whatever the Wakandan title translates as. That’d be creepy. Princess Shuri might be the most brilliant mind on the planet as far as humanity as a whole can measure, and also the coolest, but dating age she’s very much not. Tony wants to fling himself on a cliff for putting a foot in his mouth with Rhodey the other day. This is why he should not be allowed to interact with people, he’s like a dumbass Icarus but instead of wax melting it’s just inadequate research and his own inability to stop talking. Also instead of the ocean, it’s having Rhodey think he’s a creep, shrine to the Iron Ass notwithstanding.

Age is not something he typically takes note of in people, things like that or height or perfume or shoe size are more or less irrelevant to him so long as they can rearrange a breadboard without much difficulty or get into the finer points of FTL travel. Hell, he was building passable AI at seven or so, who is he to judge?

Maybe he can take a severance package instead of going back in to work tomorrow.

And the Dora Milaje are terrifying. They’d look at him and just know he has the kind of scrapbook collection better suited to a 13 year old teenybopper music fan. Or a particularly butt-obsessed serial killer. And then they’d disappear him and no one would notice because they wear red anyway, and Wakandan clothing probably evaporates bloodstains on contact. Their laundry must be next level to deal with all the tech enmeshed in there. He wonders if they have super secret surfactant discoveries. Didn’t toothpaste come from an African plant?

Tony figures he can do his not-technologically-interesting laundry at a later point. Laundry is for when the closet is completely devoid of clothing, not for today. There’s like, a package of socks in there. Some majority-unstained pants. Whatever the fuck is the towel situation on the top shelf. Totally justifies the postponement of schlepping all his dirty underwear down the corner and over to the laundromat. He could build a bot to do it for him, even.

He misses his bots, both for their ability to assist in menial drudgery like picking things up from the carpet and for staving off the sense of living in captivity. He’s ruminating on toothpaste, here.

Speaking of captivity, the fish tank is humming away. His snails are tracing little spirals on the glass, sedate and slimy. Tony eats some lemon curd from the jar with a spoon, and lies on his back imagining the watery twilight on the ceiling is covered with nebulae and their billions of stars. If he can eat the whole jar, he’ll have somewhere to store the assorted rubber bands and lone pencil he’s found under the stove.

His phone buzzes from its blanket nest on the futon, and he digs it out to see that Peter is in fact not grounded, small mercies, but has to do homework.

Tony goes and puts the remaining blueberries back into the flickering incandescent light of the fridge, and settles into the floor near the base of the tank for an evening of being a boring old man with his article collection. Maybe he’ll reread the transcript of the commencement speech Rhodey gave several years back about how the best heroic acts are the smallest ones, the unsung victories that form the building blocks of human progress. It always cheers him up, thinking about watching a grainy video of that speech on a public library computer, and deciding to submit an application to work for RLI. It didn’t pan out the first time, but it was a start towards something that he wouldn’t trade for the world.

Or he could go for last year’s GQ editorial that has a truly inspired photoset of Iron Man, half out of an artfully disheveled yet exquisitely tailored tuxedo suit, the armature of the armor springing over his bare chest. Tony has less sentimental reasons for that one, but shame is for those who have a stable relationship with the concept of dignity. He’s already compared himself to greek tragedy today; Tony will take the high-def imagery.

His phone buzzes again, and he expects it to be Peter with some ridiculous question that neither of them can pretend is homework-related, but the caller id for the text doesn’t register. It takes Tony a half second longer to remember who it is, but then it hits him.

It’s Rhodey’s number, the ‘call me if you need anything’ one. The ‘Iron Man’s personal line’ one.

Tony, predictably, drops the phone onto his face in shock, swears loudly, and fails to sit upright. Dignity, thy name is definitely not Jarvis, Tony thinks from his resigned sprawl on the carpet as he swipes the screen display open to see the message again.

_Ready to get back to the mad science yet? Nat said you got home ok for the weekend, but I don’t think she was joking when she said you’d be going stir crazy in under a day._

Tony makes a noise that is definitely a sound grown men make, all the time. He doesn’t know what game Nat is playing that Rhodey feels the need to bring her into this, but if he’s texting him this late, she’s probably not around and just said something earlier. At least, Tony hopes so. He also hopes she didn’t mention his tone, which was not whining because he never whines ever, at being made to leave RLI for his apartment. Nat always knows how to cause him trouble.

He’d like to think Rhodey just thought of him spontaneously, alone in his deprived state, and felt like checking in. It’s a pipe dream, he knows. Rhodey’s never acted like he remembers Tony from when they were younger. Tony has put out hints, every now and again, mentioning undergrad, but he’s fine if it’s the case that Rhodey doesn’t realize. Tony does have a different name now, glasses, and the ability to grow magnificent facial hair, even if some of it’s greying. More DUIs and sealed records, although that might aid in recognition now that he thinks about it. He was wild as a kid.

He needs to reply to Rhodey and stop flailing, and it needs to be a text that’s coherent and not just _please let me lick your ab_ s because Tony is gonna try to escape his ‘death by drowning in the third act’ type of fate if it kills him.

He makes some outrageous denial involving Dr. Banner, because two can play at that game. That’s a lie, Tony doesn’t know what game they’re playing, if any. He’s not gonna lose, though, so he follows it up with a pot joke.

 _I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by that_ , Rhodey sends back.

_Maintain that plausible deniability, fine._

_It’s definitely just tea, and that is all I need to know._

Tony smirks, involuntarily, at Rhodey’s reply. Point one to Team Jarvis.

 _What about you?_  he sends back, _still burning the midnight oil or did you get sent home by Her High-Heeled-ness, too?_

There’s no reply for a while, and Tony’s just about vibrating with impatience as he nears the end of the lemon curd. He wishes he could see Rhodey in person to gauge if he’s made the silence awkward or if it’s just the typical post-workday exhaustion, and then immediately takes that thought back.

He knows better than to imagine himself in Rhodes’ company, knows he doesn’t need the torment of actually taking it seriously, thinking about what kind of intimacy they’d have, romantic or not. He looks up at the firmament where his hero dwells, and he draws his line in the sand. There’s more than one way to distance people, and a pedestal is the only thing Tony has left, because he can’t bring himself to make a monster out of people anymore.

Tony wishes instead that he could fly, as that is safer, and types another missive into the hologram keyboard floating above the screen.

 _Or is it those fake Doombots again? That can’t be good for your energy levels._ He hits send just as a reply pops up.

_Nah, Pep’s off for a while, I have to be the responsible adult for once, and deal with legislative idiocy instead of doing my damn job or helping the A-Team._

Tony really wants to know what politician he should spam with angry letters to help combat whatever the government is trying to pull on the Avengers now, but another reply comes in immediately after.

 _How did you know they were fake?_ Tony rolls his eyes in the privacy of darkness. Rhodey must really be wiped out.

 _Videos of them were up on the news_ , he sends back sarcastically, before he takes pity on him and explains.  
_They’re the wrong kind of mech construction and don’t have multiple kinds of firepower._  
_Doombots always have seams like clothing, right?_  
 _These guys had rivets everywhere, real shoddy work for RCA stuff._

Tony can’t help himself from continuing as the little glowing icon spins to indicate Rhodey’s typing again.  
  
_You could probably source the metal, and next time they show up, try to relay the signals to another proxy, backtrack from there._

The icon stops spinning, then starts again, then stops. Tony grins at the ceiling.

_Or...I can make my best researcher do it for me.  
Chop Chop, let's get that ball rolling._

Tony drops his phone again at the praise, but snatches it up to fire back.

_Flattery gets you nowhere, sunshine, I have tomorrow off and limited clearance levels._

_Oh well, I’ll just have to play with all of this blasted up metal scrap all by myself then_

_You are cruel and vindictive and I’m changing your name to Iron Mean_

_...with all these brand-new Wakandan monitoring sensor arrays_  
_...plus that fancy crucible device for reforging metal components_

 _Now you’re just bragging, you dick_  
_Iron Dick_

 _See you at noon tomorrow in the upper labs in VIO 4_  
_I’ll text you when I know which one is free  
Be there or be square _

_You are an ass of the highest variety, I hope you know that_

_Well if that’s how you wanna be like then I’ll skip placing your part of a lunch order._

_Now you try to wine and dine me, huh?_

The spinning icon stops. Tony waits, heart pounding around the bits of shrapnel-shaped pain he’s used to ignoring. He refuses to look at the fishtank, at the snails and fish who have heard his secrets before and keep moving regardless. His leg shakes in a desperate need to fidget.

 _Now who’s being a dick, huh_  
_So what are your demands, oh intractable one?_

Tony closes his eyes tightly, watching the inversely colored glow of lights play across the inside of his eyelids, and exhales as much air from his lungs as he can manage. Falling doesn’t kill Icarus, the ocean pulling at his wings is what drowns him. He sits up, successfully this time, and types back.

 _Just don’t make me go over to VIO or wear a fucking dorky labcoat on my day off_ , he sends.

_Clean your lab up & we’ll relocate there but eye gear is non-negotiable, my man _

_Done and done._  
_Wait is lunch still part of the deal?_

 _Come in tomorrow to find out_ , says Rhodey’s text. _Iron Dick out._  
  
Tony rolls over, phone discarded, and muffles a scream into the clean carpet. Fuck if he can stop himself when it comes to trying to touch the sun. He should know better, but Act 3, eat your heart out. There’s lemon curd on his clean carpet now, and he faceplants into another scream.

Eventually his downstairs neighbor raps the ceiling to get him to shut up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So maybe I read a thing, a thing which is now deleted from this website for being some NonsenseTM, that I took umbrage with. And maybe that got channeled into this chapter a bit. Just a small amount.
> 
> Hey, if other people can channel their inner biases into a shitty characterization to serve as their mouthpiece for their own need to spout off online, then other writers, who care about things like actually enjoyable fiction as a connection to others and not being a racist hack, can maybe also channel some feelings, ja?
> 
> Go give BP your money, be excellent to one another.


	11. in  which lying to yourself about your hot friend isn’t just a river in egypt, also it’s midnight, do you know what your fic rating is up to?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quick lil' bonus chapter cause y'all are champs for sticking with me. Set immediately after ch. 10, in case it's not obvious.
> 
> [Bow chicka-wow-wow. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUPxgigVgWc)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: i’m ace so like, if this does it for you, congrats i have successfully duplicated human sexual feelings yay, and if it’s clunky, i’m blaming me being like LMAO BOI WHATTT the entire time. So that’s the real news.

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, Jim makes himself a pot of decaf coffee, foul beverage of lies that it is, and sits on the couch watching telenovelas with the sound off and making up trashy stories in lieu of following along with any particular drama. There’s a few faces who are in multiple shows, making it easy to string a pointless plot together out of the overacting and reaction shots.

Sometimes he’ll read up on some ridiculously specialized hobby, like the considerations involved in knitting sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills, or the statistics on dollhouse furniture markets in Australia during economic recessions, or the known types of bioluminescent invertebrates in certain deep sea regions of the ocean, until he’s either asleep or planning solutions to underlying issues.

Sometimes he practices the piano, or stargazes, and tries to get outside of his tiny human perspective to understand the universe. He goes until he feels like failure is just as good as success, on his enclosed balcony. Sometime it takes days to get to that feeling, sometime minutes.

Sometimes, like today, he locks himself in his shower-less bathroom and gets off to the idea of fucking his employee’s goddamn genius brains out, and while he feels incredibly guilty and awful for taking advantage, even though it’s just in his own mind, it never disappoints.

Part of him wishes it was simple, or easy, or maybe just as fleeting as with anything before, but he knows it’s not ever going to be a straightforward kind of desire. With Tony, it never really is. He doesn’t think he’d want it to be, really.

When the role was filled by Pepper, it was easier. When that role was filled by Pepper mentally, and physically by whoever he was bringing home for no strings attached fun, it was easier. When he and Pep were actually dating, if he’s calling it that, it was easier, too.

When it was Bruce, and it was definitely not dating, it was easier. Suspension bridge effect, a flash in the pan. No casualties on any side, except he can’t look the Hulk in the eye directly. Luckily Jim has a mask on the suit, and Bruce may or may not be in some kinda thing with an Asgardian or two.

Jim knows he’s got an intimacy problem, and he knows he’s used to jumping into bed with people in lieu of letting them in. He’s destroyed relationships that way, it’s honestly a miracle Pep still talks to him.

He’s always going to love her in a way that isn’t only friendship, but he’s glad they’ve realized it’s not exactly a romance sort of love, either. Closer to arson, maybe, where you want to see the bones of a place anyway you can, no matter the cost. He’s stopped trying to name it, and she’s moved on.

So he made a deal with himself to not fuck his employees or coworkers anymore. It held up ok, until he woke up one morning after a stint of Avenging and stared at the spreading infection in his lower body, pieced together with scraps and redesigned into a simulacra of a man. The modern Prometheus, both Frankenstein and creation in one, and it weighed down something in him the way nothing else had.

The first time it lifted was Tony’s casual remark from the back of the room in a tech dev meeting where no other researcher was willing to be direct about how there was no real synthetic material that could stay in situ for a lifetime, and they were going in circles trying to pretend Jim wasn’t poisoning himself.

Well if synthetics aren’t working, why not use biotics? Tony was waving a hand around wildly. If we’re already playing God here, and you’re on a clock where you either kick the bucket from synapse failure or make yourself into a free-floating consciousness like it’s the eighties but without the rubber hair or stutter, let’s just dream up the craziest solution possible.

Jim hadn’t recognized who it was, then, with marker all up one side of his face, thirty years older than before, and had just chuckled in his face from the exhaustion and helplessness. Yeah, grow me a new spine. Physician, heal thyself!

Stem cells for everyone, Tony had said, you get a new spine, you get a new ganglia, everybody gets new organs!

Jim fucking lost it to laughing, to the alarm of most of the researchers, told them to come back in a month with the most off the wall ideas they could pull out of the ether.

And then he’d gone home and sunk back into the fog, if he even was the best candidate for medical progress, until he remembered to ask Pepper for the employee files, and then had laughed somewhat hysterically when he read the data. Of course it was Tony, just with his own problems, a new last name, stunningly terrible facial hair, and a frankly impressive amount of redaction in his arrest records.

He got Tony his own lab to be a genius in, tried to make it as above board as possible. It’s reasonable to make a customized lab for a crazy idea contest winner, Jim’s done it before and since, he’s a great boss with a stellar retention rate. His employees get shiny toys all the damn time. It’s not playing favorites, except for how it totally is because he’s willing to do a whole lot to keep his once-upon-a-time fantasy in his reach.

Bruce had raised his eyebrows and declined to have Tony in VIO, cited a desire for infrequent evacuations, and had made a comment that Jim refused to acknowledge because Jim really is trying to not fuck his employees anymore. Tony wouldn’t get a job anywhere else with his rap sheet and frequent resume gaps; Jim’s not a goddamn asshole to make him choose like that.

So he’s Yinsen’s problem for the foreseeable future, and Tony and Jim are simply committed to Awesome Science together. No jeopardizing the coolest friendship known to man. Being his boss is awkward enough, honestly.

But, well. That sort of moral reasoning and restraint flies right the fuck out of the window when it’s 3 am and one hand is on his modified-but-still-basically-biotic dick as he’s picturing Tony half naked and slowly fingering himself open, dripping with sweat and lube and god knows what else, panting out how much he wants Jim to see him this way. To enjoy it, make it hard on him and push his stamina, because Jim knows how much Tony loves a challenge. Looking over his shoulder across to him, eyes unfocused but that fucking smirk on his face, the one Jim wants to demolish with teeth and tongue and anything that’ll keep it coming back to him. Only to him.

Jim has no idea what Tony’s sex life is like because if he thinks too long about someone else in that role, he loses his damn mind to a twisted kind of envy. It’s less than great for his dick to have the reality check of not knowing if Tony’s footloose or hasn’t had much, but it’s not exactly a buzzkill to think about how he could stake claim, be better than anyone else could be for him. Sometimes the Tony in Jim’s fantasies says that, in curses or in praise.

Sometimes he makes Jim prove it.

Tony has no idea the amount of times Jim has done this, imagined breaking his sarcastic defenses down to remake him into the barest thread of consciousness with only one name engraved into his psyche, then keeping even that quiet. Rewriting the code of him, inch by inch of skin and nerves.

Jim feels like the worst kind of person for enjoying the idea of Tony like that, when Tony probably doesn’t even remember much of Jim from way back when, or at least has never given an indication of it. It’s a sick sort of pleasure, the wrongness of it never far enough from the desire.

But Jim knows he’s gonna keep going, and if he’s going to hate himself in the morning like he always does, then he intends to fucking deserve it.

He’s gotten used to the way his body’s vitals monitoring devices shift to accommodate him getting hard, and barely hears the two toned chime that his heart rate is exceeding normal parameters and the monitoring will switch to exercise rates.

He’s too busy wanting to bite his way down the collarbone of the Tony he’s thinking about sliding in and out of, slow and tight and deep with each motion. A kitchen counter, a lab bench, or that fucking oversized holotable in the Frankenlab, anywhere he’d be able to pin down a force in constant motion, disprove him some Heisenberg like he was going for another Nobel.

Hell, he’d take even a byline on the citation list just to get close to the man, Jim can’t lie about how desperate he is when he thinks about Tony.

Tony’d want to see his face, he thinks, but he’d keep him there at his mercy, unable to fully get the right angle to go wild, just draw it out for them both until Tony would be nearly incoherent, gasping or making little noises that he’d feel vibrating against him more than hear, each time he left a new raw area on his neck, Tony’s long fingers losing their careful path to pushing into his spine in mindless points out of desperation, and it’d make the nerves feel something again.

He speeds up, then, in his mind and his hand in real life follows. He can never hold out as long as he thinks he wants to, never can just keep the image suspended and

imagining Tony over him now, victorious and grinning like Jim’s a sucker for thinking he wasn’t in control that whole time, looking so damn smug to be riding him, looking like he’s barely hanging on to the edge of it, biting his own lip, hair a mess

pulling him back into his lap, muscles straining against the physics of motion, Tony’s face up close where the painful distance between their lives vanishes into them, together, and then

Jim suddenly remembers a brief moment, he doesn’t know from when, a streak of black grime near the corner of Tony’s mouth while he was absently biting a pen cap in concentration, remembers the way he’d exhaled a little smug noise at whatever it was he was doing, and then looked up at him under dark lashes, coy like he’d won something he wasn’t planning on sharing

He comes wanting to fuck the smirk out of that mouth, have it wrapped around him, and as his back arches he can feel a spine joist connection (or seven) silently screaming in agony in his ringing ears and his vision nearly fades out, but it’s so good, even the nerve pain, that he keeps going against the nausea and dizziness of his body

until he’s breathless and aching on the bench of his obscenely luxurious half-shower, waiting to feel his pulse drop down again. It’s not unlike decompression from high altitude, he thinks, but without the armor helping him stabilize and adjust.

He grabs his watch from the pocket of pants he’d draped over the rail as a pretension of bathing, puts it on and pulls the watch face back to bring out the suit’s mainframe. It unfolds smoothly to cover his arm and run up to his torso where it melds into his spinal armature, and he uses that to check for actual damage. After he finds nothing but knots of tension in the synaptic cords that he can’t fix at present, he presses the gauntlet back and the suit flows and races back into its familiar shape at his wrist.

Jim leans his head back on the tile behind him, feeling all kinds of wrong and trying to pretend the shiver of satisfaction that fantasizing always gives him is wrong, too. By tomorrow, when he actually sees he man in question, he knows he'll have pulled back together into cohesion. When he’s no longer quite so warm, he washes up and puts on pajamas, and falls asleep before he touches the pillows of his bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like we’ve got more than one self destructive lead in this fic, huh. 
> 
> (Bruce’s comment, for the curious, was “It looks like you have a type, Rhodes, but maybe start by buying him dinner first.”)


	12. in which a well-attired spy is maudlin, grumpy, annoyed, and uncomfortable by turns, and a cameo is made in at least two parts, neither helping the situation.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now we begin Act 2 in earnest, as the esteemed Dr. Jarvis would say. Buckle up chucklefucks, there is in fact an overarching plot to this, somehow, and we're going at it full tilt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can't handle angst, I apologize in advance. Mayyyybeee wait until the fic is complete if you really can't handle angst? I promise there'll be a happy ending and all will be well and SWELLING tRIUMPHANt MUSIC and the smushing of faces, but it's some emotions until then. 
> 
> ~~I bring them in with comedy and tropes, and then I make them suffer for their fic~~ It won't be that bad, I hope? Just figured I should forewarn.

A woman with a pixie bob haircut and perfect nails steps elegantly off of the sidewalk and into a sleek black car that's idling nearby in a herd of similarly sleek cars. The hem of her dress is perfectly clean despite almost hitting the concrete under her heels. The valet, in shades despite the fading light, is leaning against the hood and nods vaguely in the direction of his new passenger but doesn't look up as she sits down, just turns his newspaper and keeps waiting.

The door reopens. The woman re-emerges from car, now with handbag in tow, and makes to depart again, as the driver folds his paper up. He stops her, wordlessly gesturing for the time, and she fusses at him while making a show of checking her bag and pulling out her phone to show him.

The car pulls off after she heads back through the hotel lobby doors, and rejoins the flow of traffic with only a minimum of honking from the surrounding vehicles.

Not bad for New York City, thinks Natasha from the inside, under a layer of facial remapping and lace front wig. She starts to remove it, until a bottle of water is thrust under her nose. It’s sealed. She takes it and sets it aside.

“Keep it on for a bit, just in case,” says the woman to her right, equally attired. “All clear will probably come through in a minute, but better safe than sorry.”

Natasha is a consummate professional who would never dream of whining that it itches, and anyway the woman in question they are duping needs a better haircut than this retro Miss Fisher's Mysteries bullshit. But it must show somewhat through the facial tech, as her doppelganger throws a blink-and-you-miss-it smirk at her.

She’s seen it before. It's uncanny on anyone else's face.

Damn microexpressions, Natasha grumbles internally as she unscrews the cap of the water to cover her suddenly accelerated pulse. She thought Janake was her second, after Carlsson, for this little three card monty, but apparently the plans have changed.

She’s gonna get Fury back for this. He’s probably up to no good. She pretends to take a swig, and recaps the bottle as the first tone of an incoming transmission starts.

“Oh my god, I know you’re incapable of not being dramatic, but relax,” says Natasha’s new partner under her breath and far too close to her as their identical earrings crackle simultaneously with Fury’s voice.

“Widow, the water is not poisoned, stand down.”

Natasha does not chuck the water bottle at anyone’s head, or set anything on fire, or scream at her hypocritical co-workers. Instead she clicks on the poison detector chip in her bicuspid as she begins to take the wig off fully, and then sips the water as the face mask reconfigures into mesh.

The vibrating alarm in the chip doesn't go off or activate the poison disruptor. Natasha did not expect it would but apparently she's no longer in the loop about things like who she is working in tandem with. The woman in question rolls her eyes at her, with another millisecond of a smirk, as she too begins to strip away the wig. Natasha is not going to punch her because the tech is expensive, and the pretty face underneath needs to be intact to work in espionage.

Not that Natasha’s calling her especially pretty.

Not that she’s hideous or something, either, just that—where is this train of thought coming from? Natasha isn’t thinking about this right now.

“We’ve got the ok from the field,” says Nick’s voice. “Socialite is secured and in play. We’re heading back to base to monitor.”

“Widow, relaying the following: you still up for a sleepover?” Falcon’s line crackles in. Natasha can picture Janet, sprawled in the nook at the Tower, in bumblebee-print footie pyjamas and eating Clint's cooking to prevent herself from getting on the line herself. Anyone somehow listening in and hearing her normally chipper voice would give the game away, so Wilson’s acting as interpreter and bodyguard in one.

Not that Natasha would call him that in Janet’s earshot, regardless of current emotional state. Janet may have called in SHIELD for backup with her runway events now that her ex husband is increasing his harassment to ‘actual security risk’ levels, but she’s never going to think she needs muscled protection.

Natasha doesn’t have experience with shitty exes herself, as her lovers generally disappear when she’s done with them (if not before), but Janet’s shitty ex makes up for it. Natasha had to listen to him talk once, back when she was just a SHIELD operative, before Fury brought the team together. Clint had turned his ears off, lucky bastard.

She'll have to see if it’s fudge brownies or waffles on the Barton DEFcon scale, though. For a man with a level of emotional nuance not unlike the approximate airspeed velocity of a cinder block, he seems to be able to grasp the finer points of distress in those around him via cuisine. Wilson, at least, can form complete sentences about his feelings. Natasha appreciates it so long as he points this skillset away from her direction.

The agent across from her raises an eyebrow at his query, but Natasha is too focused to respond to it. Or stick her tongue out at her.

“So long as it’s not another Legally Blond marathon,” she replies instead, listening for the glimmer of Janet’s laugh in the background, barely audible over the crackle and hiss of the comm line. “There’s only so much I can put up with.”

“Well I have a vote for Princess Bride against a vote for Monty Python, so you get to tiebreak.”

“Deal,” says Natasha, resolutely ignoring the way a certain agent’s lips quirk to one side.

“You’re voting against me no matter what I pick, huh?” Sam grumbles good-naturedly. Natasha hums noncommittally, listening for Janet's barely-there laugh on the line again before they radio out. Agent 13 isn't even pretending to hide a smirk at this point.

It’s easier playing a part. She feels exposed and off-kilter like this, in a dress ten years too young for her and mindlessly going back and forth with Wilson over dumb things. Is Fury intending to draw her out this way? Why is 13 even here? She’s overthinking it, but it’s Fury’s power play, so she’s going to keep on doing so.

Natasha wants to get out of this car and this dress and go find a bar with only greasy food on the menu and cheap alcohol and people who leave her be if she rants about her boss being concerned how she’s going to die alone, like that’s not an ideal state to aspire to. She wants to text her EESB&B chat about how abusive men should just all fuck off and die already, and have them inform her for the nth time that if a man wrongs you, you kill him, and if it’s your husband, you get an unrelated third party to kill him for you, as a courtesy. She wants to check to see if Cap's gotten better at responding to relentless mockery from the team. She doesn’t want to be here, with 13 shaking out her blond hair and reapplying lipstick, a witness to how thin the veneer is between Black Widow and the grumpy bitch who has been in fashion heels for three hours and was plotting to kill Hank Pym just to escape from enforced femininity for the duration.

Fury would make a very effective torturer, she thinks, while Agent 13 pops her lips to set the color evenly. It’s a muted plum. Natasha hates everything.

She has regrets about things she may have said at Avengers Drunken Karaoke. Fury’s memory is impeccable, and his blueberry vodka capacity is deceptive. Also, she has nothing to hold over his head in return, as he keeps blackmail photos on his desk where others would keep family portraits or snowglobes. If she were to imply a video of him in a pink wig and not much else was potentially scandalous, he’d probably have it playing on the monitoring deck until Hill threatened to shoot him in mutiny.

Natasha does not appreciate her boss playing yenta. She does not look at 13, and instead checks out the window. It’s silent as they keep driving, buildings blurring past in rapid succession. She doesn't want to watch screwball comedy and commiserate over whatever Janet is feeling after this. Yes, she knows how it feels to have your past trying to interrupt your present, but she's not big on team bonding and heart to hearts. She wants to be miserable in silence. 

Or maybe she can persuade them to watch _Clue_. 

“T minus half an hour til we’re back, Agents,” comes over the line, but something catches Natasha’s eye, and she doesn’t hear the rest as she hastily finishes getting out of the dress and into street clothing. 13 startles, and one hand goes to her side in a way that indicates she has knives at the ready. Which is unfair, as Natasha was told she couldn’t bring her stilettos. She has them anyway, of course, but the point stands.

“What’s happening?” Agent 13 asks, starting to follow suit with her own dress, but she takes the earrings and heels that Natasha tosses to her.

“No time to explain, I’ll call if I need backup but it’s not a threat situation,” Natasha says before banging on the partition to the driver. “Agent Ramirez, pull over.” 

The discarded earrings crackle with transmissions, but the car’s already switching lanes, so she doesn’t dignify that with a response, just turns to look back at 13 pulling on a CUNY sweatshirt and backpack as a disguise and grumbling about sudden changes in plans. Sudden changes have been the stars of the whole damn day, but Natasha takes pity on her. She _is_ more or less suiting up with no warning to act as backup to Natasha’s freefall.

“I saw something I need to check out back there, but it’s not SHIELD, don’t worry.”

“Tough shit, I’m worrying anyway!”

“It’s Avengers, not SHIELD, you can stand down.”

“Hell no, unless you can guarantee you won’t need ground support," 13 fires back. "It’ll take the A-team how long to get out here?”

Natasha regrets her moment of weakness; Agent 13 isn’t going to just let it go. She pulls her in, blocking the transmitter so Fury’s not privy to it, as the car slows to a halt. She needs more time to assess before she involves Nick, but if she’d let this chance slide, she can’t be sure she’ll get another.

“There’s a mutant or unknown tech, who keeps popping up and disappearing, and I spotted them again. I need to take care of this now before I lose them again.”

She nods, slowly, finally backing off and Natasha goes to open the door, but the driver partition slides back to reveal Nick Goddamn Fury, because of course he’s moonlighting as a cabbie instead of Ramirez for maximum dramatic effect or to fuck up protocol or whatever. At least 13 looks just as pissed at this stunt as Natasha feels, small victories.

“That ‘spider-man’ or whoever it is? Bring ‘em back to HQ, we can kill two birds with one stone. We’ll regroup there,” Fury says. “Widow, you’re dismissed, but next time keep me in the loop.”  
  
Natasha does not swear at him, but it’s a close call. Yes, she had sounded the alarm several weeks ago about Avengers business getting too hectic for the team to manage, but this isn’t what she meant. She exits the car, and the last view she gets is Agent 13’s concerned face as Sharon makes a hasty “call me if you need me” gesture.  
  
Natasha hits the ground running. It takes one spy to trap another, as the saying goes and Fury has demonstrated yet again, and she figures spiders aren’t that different. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to be mostly quiet and going so long without posting, plus this semi-cliffhanger chapter ending. Real life has been A Wee Bit Not Great, and my coherent writing time is decreased because of it.
> 
> also I'm writing with no t key, just ctrl + v. it's fun. I apologize for any errors, lmk if you spot any incorrect t usage so I can correct it. 
> 
> someday my bluetooth keyboard will resurface. that will be a good day.


	13. in which everyone’s favorite superhero, no not you clint, is having a rough time of it and his vague father figure isn’t helping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~~Ricardo~~ Jim Rhodes is definitely on top of things. 
> 
> But there's a strong probability that is gonna change by the end of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a minute, huh?!
> 
> More MCU stuff happened, and I'm ignoring all of it as I generally do, because emotional investment in the MCU is a loser's game and fanfiction is where true joy can be known. Come be in an AU safe haven here with your friend Sid. I'll dish out angst, sure, but it's not unreasonable and I will make sure to have the happiest of endings. All will be well. 
> 
> thanks also for all the kudos and hits and comments, you guys rock. I'm really just writing this to get it out of my head, but i'm glad to hear it is finding a loving audience. Please look at the bottom author notes, too, I have a query but I'll give y'all the chapter first.

There’s a soft chime from the door of the lab he’s commandeered from the steely control of VIO, meaning someone with adequate clearance is approaching. Jim hopes it’s not Bruce here to reclaim his rightful property and kick him out to some other part of RLI.

Maybe Bruce would be understanding. Jim is hiding from the world at large and the press in particular, and Pepper vetoed flying to the Cali lab site for an impromptu visit on the basis of jet lag and time differences and other inherently sensible stuff. Then she kicked him out of the executive building for, quote “whining about not being allowed to bend the laws of physics” unquote.

He would hate to have to hole up in some other spot on campus. The press think there’s a conspiracy to uncover, whereas the actual facts of the matter are kind of boring, i.e. moving toward out of court settlements, but nothing is going to stop them from crawling all over the place making damn nuisances of themselves. A few days ago he got trapped in the public shop and cafe area of RLI, and was hiding in an officially licensed Hulk mask and accompanying hands for an hour behind the drink counter. Bruce can never know.

The cafe employee who figured it out in about .5 seconds (and proceeded to take the opportunity to make him mop the bathroom and call him Ricardo of all things for the duration) is getting a raise though.

There’s a knock at the door, and Jim looks over his shoulder.

“Colonel, you done pretending to be busy?” comes through the distorted glass. Nick Fury, director of SHIELD and not the worst person to suddenly drop in on RLI, is on the other side and looking as much like a storm cloud as ever.

Jim swivels around to face his guest fully via his lower armor’s articulation with a laugh.

“What the hell you standing on ceremony for, man, get in here,” he says, as Nick comes through the sliding door with only a minor flair of his long coat.

“I’ve been told I’m too dramatic by half, so you know I had to live up to it,” he says, thumping Jim on the back as they embrace briefly. “Working on my ominous presence and all that.”

“Can’t be too bad if you’re wearing the good eyepatch,” Jim says, tamping down a grin. It has a single pink rhinestone coming undone on one side, like a lonely and distracting star. He’s not going to ask. “You here to catch up or catch me up?”

“I swing both ways,” Nick replies, and Jim nearly aspirates his own saliva. “This lab is secure, I presume.”

“How dare you,” he jokes back, flipping the watch up from his pocket and onto his wrist as a gauntlet to program the various add-ons around the room to display. Nick assesses the blackout monitoring with a careful eye, and nods slowly before taking a seat on the side of the lab bench. Jim follows suit.

They spend almost an hour going over the latest information on Ross, Pym, mystery Non-Doombots, and Captain Marvel’s feedback from space.

An internal investigation into Ross’s actions is rumored to be underway on the Army side of things, with a few four and three stars ready to bring the five down a peg, meaning that Ross’ll be incentivized to settle with RLI as soon as possible and regardless of constraints in order to avoid a war on two fronts. 

Pym has been located for clandestine monitoring, and Janet’s choosing to drop a few engagements with the Avengers and her fashion industry gigs to focus on staying low profile until Pym’s movements have a clear pattern.

Jim makes a mental note to ask her to do some redesigns on Avengers costumes if she seems unhappy being benched. He’ll have to be careful to not make her feel like it’s a pity assignment, but Barton will be willing to demand more purple on his body to lend credence to the idea, and Bruce always appreciates Hulk-resistant clothes that don’t look like he’s on a deserted island.

The non-genuine Doombot bits have been materially analyzed and there’s nothing conclusive there. The black box components are still being checked for information.

Captain Marvel has successfully punched many things in space, and probably in time as well. The Kree-Skrull-Earth truce is holding up better than expected.

Jim writes up a few notes, checking with Fury that he’s only got the non-classified information in there, before sending it to the team.

“One more thing,” says Nick, standing up. “I’m not here to tell you what choices to make in this. You know I’m saying what I’m saying from a place of respect.”

“I know,” Jim says, but if Nick’s been saving something for last, after all of their talk, then Jim isn’t banking on this being a courtesy call. “I know you care about this.”

“Not just this, Jim. I’m not going to go twenty rounds of ‘actually friends with you’ jeopardy, I trust we’re past that.”

“I’ll take ‘what is the denouement, then’, for $400. Don’t pull your punches with me.”

Nick huffs out a laugh. “Well, brother, since you asked so nicely,” he says, and pulls a small lump of something red and blue, cloth maybe, or metal, out of the folds of his coat. He sets it down in front of Jim, and leans over, clapping a hand on his shoulder that’s not unkind, but definitely not brotherly.

“It’s past time to clean your fucking house, Colonel.”

Jim reaches for the mystery present, a synthetic material that slithers into more recognizable shape as he picks it up, sleeves and a hood visible where they hang down.

“Nick, what in the—” Jim starts, then pauses. He can see familiar eye sockets, winged like overly enthusiastic eyeliner. They’re smaller than he remembers from being on call, and his stomach drops. Barely-there seams and rivulets of metal arc over the surface, like a spiderweb.

“This what I think it is?”

“It’s too good to be anything but RLI tech,” says Fury at his shoulder, “so either you have an explanation for me right now, or I’ll come back when you do.”

Jim holds the suit up fully, and runs a careful finger along the apparent edge. There’s no discernible surface disruption from the metal meshed into the fabric. Fury’s right about the source, it’s too good to be a lone wolf, too professional.

If it were a bit better, he’d question T’challa but Wakanda has no interest in arming stray children in New York of all places. Also Princess Shuri’s touch is very recognizable, micro-engravings and little in-jokes from an engineering perspective. This is clearly different from her style, although no less meticulous, but it feels like something he’s seen before. He can’t place it; he needs to see it up close.

“A personal one, mind you, I’m not interested in having your extensive legal machinations aimed at me,” Fury continues. Jim feels his jaw clench, but he forces himself to relax. The man standing over him isn’t his enemy. Isn’t another mentor waiting in the wings to take him down.

Isn’t here to see him fall.

He carefully puts a hand in through the opening in the neck area of the suit he’s holding, and it melds to his skin like the Iron Man armor if it were laced with amphetamines. He takes his hand back out when it gets too weird.

“I’m coming off like I’m ready to kneecap you, but this isn’t a gotcha, Rhodes,” says Nick, a degree of dark humor in his tone. “This is all the warning you get to CYA, and I’m showing you my hand here because I think you aren’t bluffing me.”

Jim nods. If Nick wanted to keep this as an ace up his sleeve, he’d never have given an explanation or talked one on one. He’s suddenly thankful Nick’s positioned them so as to avoid eye contact, and rubs the hand not holding up the spider suit over his chin.

“I think you’re tired, so you’re slipping where no one sees it until it’s too late, and you need to refocus. Not just your exhaustion, not just running the Avengers. You need to shore up your issues, superpowered or otherwise, because Ross doesn’t need another opening to come after you and SHIELD doesn’t need another liability to protect.”

“I’m telling Janet you called her that,” Jim says absentmindedly.

“Don’t play cute with me. I know you think it’s just you out there in the superhero game, but SHIELD is and has been putting it on the line for you. You specifically, Rhodes, since you came over all noble pacifist, and your teammates as well now that you all stepped up to do avenging full time,” Fury says, pushing a solid finger into Jim’s shoulder muscle. “SHIELD can’t be the only contingency plan much longer, much less if I’m only informed of the level of involvement needed after the fact. I can’t play nanny to your kindergarten.”

“Then you want us to pull our weight, you want me to do this without your backup when SHIELD was what facilitated this whole team in the first place?” Jim asks, incredulous. He might be tired, and definitely not seeing where Fury is going with this, but he doesn’t like what he’s hearing. “Or you want us to disband, or what, now?”

Fury exhales, as if he’s suddenly just as tired. Or maybe just reassessing his angle of approach, Jim thinks. Something’s not adding up.

“I want you to not need us,” he says. No particular epiphanies follow his words.

“I’m lost,” says Jim, spreading his hands. Fury turns and looks at him again, his face unreadable and cryptic again.

“It’s getting to the point where what we at SHIELD can do, what we can have documented oversight of on the books, is too narrow for the scope of what you are doing.” As Jim processes that, he continues.

“And it’s getting to the point where our red tape, our need for privacy, is conflicting with your need for authority to act.”

“We’ve outgrown Shield?” Jim muses, “or we’re too visible now to be part of it.” He’s not convinced this is the full picture. Why now? Why with the added emphasis on the Spider-man instead of in their earlier conversation?

“Can’t say,” says Fury, ever the font of information. He leans forward again, tone serious.

“But my advice is that you need to refocus. You as head of RLI, you as head of the avengers, you as Iron Man. I’m not saying stop, I’m not saying anything, I’m just advising that you figure out where you wanna go from here knowing what you know. Because this kid is the beginning of a trend, and we don’t have a contingency for it yet, but it’s coming.”

Jim’s bullshit detectors are pinging. Well, that’s not fully fair to Fury and SHIELD, the concerns are valid ones to address. But he’s spent enough time in the military and political arenas to have honed an ear for the unspoken, underlying message. Time to remove the distractions, this isn’t just about kids in costumes.

“What aren’t you telling me, Nick,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning forward as well to mirror his body language. The man facing him laughs, possibly in surprise. Or in victory.

“You’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself one of these days, kid,” he says, which allays exactly zero of Jim’s fears and answers even less of his questions.

“I’ll handle my end,” Jim counters. “But if I don’t have the cards to play, I’ll keep needing back-up.” Nick snorts.

“Oh, you’re gonna need back-up as long as the Avengers exist, it just doesn’t pay to put all your eggs in one basket when it’s _my_ basket,” he says. Jim keeps pushing.

“But you came here to get my end in order, to show me enough of your hand that you can point me where you need,” he says. Fury is silent, his eye laser sharp on Jim. It’s confirmation enough that the gears are turning, which means the chessmaster is debating a move.

“Tell me the bigger picture,” Jim pleads, finally. He’s not here for games, and he’s wagering that Nick can respect that.

“I can’t say much,” Nick starts, “but you aren’t the only one that needs to clean house.”

The weight of that statement hangs heavy in the air of the lab.

“Cap is going to need more than his boyish good looks to defend the extent of punching he’s going to want to do,” he finishes up. Jim didn’t think that “hey we might be compromised” could get worse, but apparently it can if he’s picking up what Fury’s laying down.

“Fuck me,” mutters Jim. He has more questions now—how long has this been known, how deep does it go, how much is Hydra controlling beyond just SHIELD—but he knows he’s gotten more than he expected already out of Fury, and he knows when to drop it.

“Pass,” Fury says in the tone of a man relishing another opportunity to make innuendo. Jim ignores him in favor of refocusing. As advised.

“You can’t get us involved without it being way worse, too, right. Hell. Does Nat know? Clint?” Fury nods. He’s clearly already got his pieces in motion.

“They both got the heads up, and they can be your headache now.” He leans away again from Jim, puts his hands back into his voluminous pockets as if signifying he’s done here.

“As can this,” he adds, nodding at the spider suit in Jim’s possession. “I need a response and a plan of how you’re gonna handle it. Kid’s been released with a warning. I’ve got to go back to the grind but don’t be a stranger.”

As he watches the retreating back of the director of Shield, Jim thinks that Fury’s perfected the ominous presence already. He runs a finger along the suit in his hand again, contemplatively squeezes it, and nearly jumps a foot in the air when it stings him, numbing his arm to the elbow lightening fast.

The gauntlet covers his hand mere nanoseconds too late, but starts processing the injury and working to restore motion as if he was back to square one with his spinal decay. Son of a bitch. The passive muscle motion helps with the numbing, and Jim can tell it’s already fading, but if that wasn’t painful…

A large part of him is glad the kid has real protection like that, but on closer inspection he can now see the micro-mechanism where the sting emerged and any glad feeling he has is washed out cold in the wake. It’s a design he’s seen before, but only once, and very briefly, but it’s burned into his brain.

Because it’s Tony’s two-track looping coil mechanism.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO questions, answer is optional:
> 
> Since I'm having very little time to write (or do much of anything really) this spring/summer, would all y'all prefer I go on hiatus until I've written a bunch more of this and release it later with a more frequent schedule, or would people rather take what they can as I write it? I.E. option one is a break in updates now for more regular content later on, option two is the same as now, with the warning that it may be very sporadic.
> 
> And then I say this as I leave you on a cliffhanger, of course...


	14. in which the hardest working Chief Operational Officer in the country debates the merits of just killing her boss, in front of him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do you call an argument with Pepper Potts? You don't call it.
> 
> Jim remains off-kilter, Pep comes to a Conclusion, things are not really resolved but at least no one's corpse is getting displayed in the lobby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all! It's been a hot minute.
> 
> I was gonna write a Tony-POV chapter in between these but this got written first, so that'll be next chapter. Whenever that is. ~~*sobs* i have to get on planes and be an adult and not spend my free time writing~~

Pepper is pacing around the room, heels a constant staccato in the background as Jim slowly mutes the holographic display of the spider suit's design. He knows she's pissed. He's just tired.

It seems to be a constant refrain for him, these days. He’ll deal with that later.

"Alright, Pep. I'm ready for the riot act, hit me," he says, and she throws up her hands in frustration.

"Your problem, Jimmy, you know what your problem is?" Pepper says, livid and hurting. "You just keep giving people chances when they don't deserve them. And then you patch up the fallout, and, and pretend everything's fine even though it is not, and then you fly off to play hero."

It's not the conversation he though they'd be having, but that's Pepper Potts for you. Jim lets the pang of guilt and anger twist in his lungs, away from his vocal cords. She holds his gaze, as if she's waiting to be contradicted, and her words keeping coming like precision strikes.

"You're trying to stay above it all and in control, in the clouds with your latest three point eight million revamp of a tin can, and you pretend you prefer it that way, like it'll fix what's wrong in the world, but really you're so scared of coming down here and doing the real work, the hard part, of living, that you never take off the armor." Pepper puts her hands on the table between them, as if the effort of her rage is sapping her strength. "You think you are the armor, that you have to be that ideal, and it's warped you, James."

"You have such a good heart, and morals, and a belief in people and science, and you treat yourself like shit to live up to how much you care." Her voices wavers on the profanity, breaks on the ending, but she keeps going.

"You see suffering and you pour money into solutions. You point your scientists and lawyers and lobbyists at all the bad in the world, you go out and rally your team to do the same for the whole goddamn universe. And the bad doesn't stop, from Stane to Chitauri to Killian to Ross to whatever the hell comes next."

"It's not a weakness to care," Jim says through a thick throat. His eyes sting.

"It's not, of course it's not," she replies. "You're a good man, Jimmy, and you know I'd stuff and mount your corpse and take over RLI in a heartbeat if you weren't."

"Incredibly morbid there, Pep." She rolls her eyes at him, half laughing and half crying. He gets up and she comes around the table and hugs him tightly. He wraps his arms around her in wordless apology. It's not enough but he hates hearing her feel lost.

"Please, your investors can still get their precious photo ops with none the wiser, we have robotics," she says into his shoulder, sniffling slightly.

"I'm alarmed at how cavalierly you say that, girl."

After a while where it feels like they are just holding each other up, Pepper speaks again.

"Jimmy, it's not a weakness. But it's no a way to live, either, with the universe on your shoulders, waiting until the oxygen runs out."

"Yeah, the theme of everyone's intervention meeting is 'Putting on your own oxygen mask first,' it seems."

"No," says Pepper with a bit of anger back in her tone, bumping her forehead into the meat of his shoulder. "It's 'Stop isolating yourself, you're being a workaholic stubborn jerk.' And 'See a therapist, I'm your CEO not a psychologist.' It's like you forget we're friends."

She pulls away, as if she's reminding herself, too, but at least she's smiling wryly again.

"Anyway, about Jarvis."

"Yeah," he says. This is the conversation he was expecting, so they're back on track, he thinks. Still won't be a walk in the park.

"I know he's like a rain soaked feral kitten or, like, possum that you found injured on the side of the road and want to fix," starts Pepper.

"Uh," says Jim.

"But now he's bitten you and wrecked your car—”

"I don't know that—"

“—and because you believe in people regardless of very clear warning signs, you have two options."

"One, you transfer him, put him on probation, demote him to a contractor, whatever will keep this from happening again while you cover your ass for RLI's sake. He never gets the same level of clearance, or lack of oversight." Pepper extends a perfectly manicured finger.

"That's playing with fire, and despite however many times I tell you, your desire to extend a second chance out of the goodness of your heart does not outweigh the need for this company to function properly and securely." Her finger turns to point squarely at him, before she extends a second.

"Two, and this is the best option, Jim, you fire him. You can write him all the references you want and call it whatever looks good for his career, but he committed an infraction of the rules, if not an actual crime." 

"That RLI doesn't disclose to employees our connection to SHIELD isn't his fault, though," Jim feels compelled to point out. Pepper's eyebrow is nearly at the wispy strands escaping from her taut hairline.

"Ok, since you want a verifiable offense, shall we audit his ridiculous lab and see if he's misappropriating funds and resources, or if he's using time on the clock to further his arming of minors?"

Jim carefully doesn't think about the time he spends with Tony in the Frankenlab, messing around with no clear research objectives other than "can we make it work or explode," just to see Tony do his weird little victory shimmy.

"No, you've made your point, Pep." His face must betray him, because it doesn't placate her one iota.

"Were you _aware_ of this? Jim, did you _know_ he was doing all this in his side projects?" she asks, incredulous.

"I wasn't aware, no, but I wasn't keeping tabs on him as closely as I could have been," he says. "Please don't taxidermy me and usurp the company, I know I fucked up, and I'm listening now."

"What the hell, I thought all the trips down to his little batcave, were for the purposes of, I don't know, monitoring his independent research!"

Jim barely has time to form a plausible denial before he watches the tumblers in the steel contraption of her brain click open. She throws her hands up again.

"Oh my God, you're in love with him aren't you," Pepper says, in the exact same tone of shaming as when she wields the almighty power of a line item veto in a budget meeting.

Jim feels a bit wounded that the reveal of his long-standing state of emotional compromise merits the same level of exasperation as the suggestion of extra in-flight bottle service for RLI's business associates.

"I've made many oversights in his case, and—"

"No, shut up, I want to hear about this, you've been single since Carol, right? And not involved with anyone since Latifah?"

"Please don't be keeping a roster of my sex partners," Jim says in horror, trying not to picture this and failing. She definitely has a spreadsheet.

"You _like_ this guy. Oh my god, it all makes sense now. The special lab. The independent status. The access to the Iron Man armor redesigns."

"Feel free to stop at any point now."

"I have every right to continue! You were skipping important meetings to go canoodle with your pet researcher!"

"Not all the meetings were that important," Jim mutters, but to deaf ears.

"Just tell me you didn't have sex on the really expensive machinery. I know all the engineering science gets you going, but it's an OSHA violation and incredibly dangerous," Pepper says, bordering on hysterical amusement. "Thank god there's no cameras down there."

Jim exhales, suddenly angry.

"I'm not fucking him, I'm not in a relationship with him, I'm not sexually harassing my employees, and I know what constitutes an OSHA violation."

Pepper does a double take that would be comic if Jim was in a better mood.

"What? Jim, we're rated as one of the best workplaces for women in STEM fields thanks to your explicit policies on the books,” she says “and I'm sure he in particular would never do something like accuse you of harassment.” Jim doesn't know what she's getting at, but it's not right to put any employee in that position and he says as much.

Pepper fixes him with a very unimpressed stare. She has an entire wardrobe of them, so to speak, and this one's killer. It silently points out that she was an employee who violated OSHA policy with him on numerous occasions, and he needs to respect her agency if he's going to be indignant about it.

Jim's anger dissipates in the face of that stare.

"Look," Pepper says, "this is a huge problem for us, and as Director Fury's visit earlier suggests, for SHIELD. I'd say tell him to start a baby superhero training program on his own time, but no one asks me."

It's Jim's turn to raise an eyebrow. Pepper favors him with another stare in her roster, this one more amused than annoyed. It reminds him of her defeated supervillain count, which is higher than his.

Not that she really lets him forget it, but still.

"I know it’s private and classified to the nth degree, I’m just saying I would like a lot less time between when you get info and when I get updated on what’s happening. I don’t need specifics, in fact please do not give me them, but I need to know the gist of things.”

Jim spends a moment wrestling with himself over Fury’s tip off, before he gives in and switches the blackout back up. Pepper’s head whips over to the display signal, then back.

“I said not to give me specifics, Jim!”

“I’m not. Avengers and SHIELD are going to be functioning on independent systems for the time being,” he says, knowing she’ll pick up on the undercurrent without prompting, “meaning we need to have this place, the tower, and any related operational networks be more air-tight than Ross’ asshole.”

Pepper snorts in spite of herself.

Jim feels like his blood is pumping ice as he tries to not think about the next logical conclusion from this. But he doesn’t think he’s got much else to go on.

“And that means I’m going to offer Jarvis an out, he won’t take being a low level lab rat well, so most likely a nice severance package for a send off. That’s not related to the Avengers thing, but I can’t keep being in five places at once. I need a tighter ship than I’ve got running right now.”

For some reason, even though he’s ceded to Pepper’s request and committed to better oversight, she frowns and fails to move on.

“I’m not sure you’re making the right call here, I want you to consider all your options before trying to fix this by jettisoning him.”

“You just told me I can’t afford to be handing out second chances, now you tell me to slow my roll?”

“That was before I knew you had feelings for him!”

“What does that have to do with it?”

Pepper looks ready to strangle him, but the blackout display begins to pulse where it hovers on the holotable. Jim pulls it back up to dismantle it and let the incoming communications through.

The screen flashes a single line: _WHEELS UP SHELLHEAD; MORE DOOMBOTS INCOMING -CAP_

Jim frowns, he would have liked a bit more time to assess his and Tony's findings on the Not-Quite-Doombot systems. But that involves thinking about the man, and he needs to stop doing that. He needs to refocus.

"Duty calls," Jim says to his highest paid employee and very unimpressed friend, and goes to play hero. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepper is 100% not going to let this "having a crush" thing go, her spreadsheet is getting revamped immediately. She should've seen this coming, tee bee haytch, statistically it's like all of Rhodey's weak spots in one condensed package.
> 
> Jim is increasing the rate of his bad life choices asymptotically chapter by chapter at this point. That's supposed to be a different character's job (Clint notwithstanding) but I guess errybody's gonna be a mess for a bit.
> 
> *makes jazz hands*
> 
> Oh, and I'm not knocking Gwyn Paltrow's acting (just her crazy health scams) but my faceclaim/fancast/headcanon for Pepper in this universe is played by either Gillian Anderson or Gina Torres with red hair. 10/10 deathglare and suit wearing.


	15. in which multiple loose ends are tied up to the sad violin noises made by a newly jailbroken spider boy and his nonplussed aunt.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An aftermath, and a way forward.
> 
> Tony is gonna miss the heck out of this kid, but he'll be in touch.
> 
> Aunt May has already done a background check on her kid's weird scientist friend, about 3 months ago when she first heard of this RLI internship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: the version of events in re: afghanistan is different here although similar in terms of what tony went through in MCU, and tony goes over a succinct summary mentally in response to peter’s comment. Hopefully not too bad, but just a head’s up that this is more direct than it’s been in the past, and pieces of what i allude to here are easy to connect the dots.

Peter’s crying has finally, well, petered out, so Tony’s flipped the futon mattress around and fluffed the pillows up a bit for him. His aunt, who is a wonderful lady who deserves all the good things in life, is sitting next to him, stroking his hair. She’s been crying too, but she cries in the way of people who are so used to grieving that they no longer notice tears.

When he gets back from finding a blanket to offer, the kid is sacked out.

Probably all the adrenaline, it’s not every day you meet a dude who looks like Mace Windu fought Wesley Snipes’ movie version of Blade and then went back for round two with Morpheus from the Matrix, and wears their coats and shades for trophy skins, and who probably is the single-handed (single eyed?) origin of the entire deep state IC conspiracy theory ranted about by paranoid netizens the world over.

Or maybe the origin of the conspiracy itself, given his “I run this shit” introduction. Tony idly wonders if a spoon is the reason for the eye damage.

Either way Peter had to face that cheerful 6 foot 2 ball of nightmare through the bars of baby superhero jail until Tony managed to show up and bust him out via his own unique brand of superpower; ie being an electromagnetic conduit for all trouble, blame, and ire in his immediate vicinity.

He yields the blanket to May, who drapes it over her nephew as Tony moves the half-drunk glass of water out of the way. He flails when he wakes up, out of habit, and maybe Pete does too.

He hates the thought that another aspect of Peter’s behavior might be born of his own fuck-ups as a person. He goes back to packing under the more-likely-than-not hypothetical surveillance of the deep state, and also a thirty something woman who has never been to his apartment before and looks like she already wants to leave.

His life’s accoutrements are laid bare around him, carefully ordered in a system no one else would see reason in, a constellation of detritus that traces the bones of a universe he hasn’t built yet.

It’s... the opposite of impressive, frankly. Most of it is unnecessary, or else the result of temporary projects and unfinished ideas. Tony feels like a castaway, buoyed up only by the jetsam on his floor, anchored by impotent rage.

Tony’s life has been an exercise in learning that the only tools he needs, he has, regardless of variables. From fathers who trade a family’s future for a ghost chase from the past, to a military that promised to bring him home no matter the cost only to let him loose and broken into an indifferent populace, Tony has dug his way into and out of rock bottom with himself as the one constant.

But that was prior to having people to care about, to need to protect.

With Peter conked out on the futon, and May getting up to rustle in his kitchen, more fool her, he’s feeling that rock bottom against his back again. How does the kids’ rhyme go? Second verse, same as the first, a little bit better and a whole lot worse?

Fuck that, he’s done with ‘worse’.

He needs five things to survive this, more or less. He needs a one way plane ticket to somewhere with a soft landing for a disgraced researcher, he needs to get a therapist recommendation wherever “somewhere” turns out to be, he needs to eat a proper NYC bagel and schmear since he’s probably never gonna go back to this city and no one else can really make ‘em right, he needs a bag with a change of clothes. Maybe with a notebook and pen, if he’s feeling fancy.

And lastly, he needs to call Sharon. He’s gonna maybe postpone that one until he has a more solid plan of where he’s going, so it’s less of a “I got myself fired for giving high tech armor to admittedly very cool children” and more of a “hey, I’m moving in a new direction in life, great things happening ahead, ignore the previous point” conversation.

It will probably be as successful as Tony’s career has been today.

“Anthony, do you have any butter?” May is also contemplating the sad state of Tony’s life, apparently.

“I have olive oil and cooking spray, I’m pretty sure,” he says. “What’re you planning?”

“Buttered noodles.” Tony detects a hint of judgement in her tone, mostly directed at his pantry. He can’t really blame her, honestly.

“I mean, mi casa es su casa and everything but I don’t know that I can improve my food situation, here. I am the quintessential bachelor scientist type that all of modern television has warned you about,” he says. She huffs a laugh at him, which is either progress or pity. “It’s a lucky thing I even have the noodles, frankly; I think Pete has been trying to leave me gifts to prevent scurvy.”

“It’s what he’d eat when—,” she pauses to collect herself and Tony hears the unsaid implications and immediately plans to go dunk his head in the shame corner that used to contain a certain dumbass goldfish but should really contain his dumbass head, “—when he was too upset to manage a full dinner. Comfort kid food, y’know?”

“No idea,” Tony admits, awkwardly. “I had to be coerced into eating anything at all, most of the time.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” May says, drily. “But your parents never had a failsafe ‘just get the kid to eat’ dish?” She makes air quotes with her fingers. It’s adorable.

“Well,” starts Tony, trying to come up with a dodge of the topic of ‘my parents were neglectful and I was raised by nannies and housekeepers well into adolescence’, because he’s literally just met this woman a few hours ago and that seems like third-date stuff at least, but it shakes a distant memory out of some corner of his mind.

“I mean, sometimes if I couldn’t sleep, Anna made gorąca czekolade.” At her blank look, Tony remembers he can’t just drop in Polish phrases with no warning. She’s not Natalie.

“It’s this really thick hot cocoa and she’d add all these weird spices, these little star-shaped seed pod things and these grated nuts and stuff. I dunno what they’re called. But you know how as a kid, it seems like the most special beverage ever.”

May looks at him as if she somehow knows. Like she is familiar with the whole absurd saga of Howard and Maria, (unlikely to be true as the deaths of a destitute former flying car salesman and his estranged wife were not of much note at the time) and is putting a few pieces of information together. Which is a devious and unkind thing to do to someone who has been trying very hard to avoid any hint of a tragic childhood in conversation, their own or anyone else’s.

Maybe she just thinks it’s weird that he’s using a first name for a parent, and he’s projecting. Six of one, and all.

“Then I will go and get butter, and assorted ‘weird’ spices, and we’ll make some comfort food. Or some really odd concoctions.” She makes air quotes again, two fingers on each hand like she’s imitating a t-rex. Tony would die in a duel of honor for her, or at least make her a nice rapier to duel for herself. May seems like she can handle a duel or two.

“Do you want me to...” Tony says, then stalls out. He doesn’t know what he’s offering. To give her money to pay for it? She doesn’t seem the type to accept so easily, and all he has on him right now is dollar coins and a seriously gross five. To go instead? He’s not gonna ask her to hang out in his dingy apartment and wait while he yells at a checkout machine that a dollar coin is in fact viable US currency. To google potential spices Anna would have used? He has no clue what spices you use for sweet flavors. Cinnamon, maybe.

He doesn’t know how to handle this kind of situation, he just doesn’t want this woman to have to deal with any more bullshit today.

“No, you just lost your job and Peter will probably be worried if he wakes up without you around,” says May.

Tony doesn’t see any logic connecting these statements to each other or anything he just failed to articulate properly, but he’s not arguing with her. She’s a woman with the slightly fanatical light of a mission in her eyes.

“Guard the fort while I’m gone,” she says, as if by rote. Probably some phrase she and Peter use to each other. Tony isn’t gonna lie, it makes him feel kind of warm and fuzzy underneath all the sad-sackery and self-flagellation.

“Aye aye, captain,” he says to her retreating figure, hears her quiet laugh again. He gives up on packing, and starts putting his stuff into garbage bags. It’ll be easier for his landlord-slash-building-super to deal with, that way. Or any government agents conveniently in the area.

He needs to talk to his landlord, too, but that’s not difficult. Discounting the hearing aids, obviously. And he needs to give Mrs. C her sewing machine back. He should make a list, he thinks. Shit’s getting complicated with all of these loose ends he needs to tie up.

His phone buzzes, and May has sent him a picture of ‘weird spices’ she is planning to acquire. He has no idea what they are, and tells her that he’s leaving it in her capable hands.

She responds a bit later with questions about cooking implements. Tony replies that again, he is a nightmare garbage human with no sense of food preparation or knowledge of his own belongings (paraphrased, obviously), and the little spinning wheel that indicates typing makes another disappearing act. Tony is nothing if not consistent in his interactions with people, at least.

Her next message instructs him to bring Peter and the noodles and himself over for an actual meal at her place, which she will cook and he will not be allowed to help with. Resistance proves futile, but she relents that it can be for dinner, since he needs to deal with his fish.

Tony neglects to mention he has kind of already dealt with most of the fish by surprising the nice couple (childfree by choice, allergic to furry animals) over in 127B, but a few of the difficult care fish are still in the apartment, so it’s a lie of omission only.

Blobbert is in the small tank where he gets put when the mega tank system needs cleaning, because otherwise he’ll kamikaze himself into the pipes and no one needs that. Fish can tell if there’s decomposition in water, and it stresses them out. Mostly. The cleaning fish will try to eat anything non-responsive.

He has no idea how he’s gonna deal with the mega tank system, so he will ignore this for now.

He’s finally finished bagging everything up, and has even sorted the bags into “just garbage” and “magical mystery tour of potential goodwill donations” piles when Peter sits up and gives him another mini heart attack.

“Where’s Aunt May?” he asks around a yawn rubbing his eyes.

“She wanted to get food supplies? Who knows why, she seemed very determined.”

“Oh,” says Peter, quietly.

“What, no jokes about my empty pantry or anything? You’re slipping on me, Pete.”

“She probably needed an excuse to leave so she could cry without us seeing,” Peter says, his aura of Inconsolable Despair and Gumbification back in full force. “She does that.”

“Nah, we’ve bonded, your aunt and I, she’s gotten teary-eyed already and is now on the up and up.” Tony gestures at the door, desperate to not play the Pokey in this scene. “She was a woman unencumbered in her mission for butter to cook with, like olive oil isn’t perfectly fine.”

“Sure,” Peter says after a pause, in a tone that completely negates his statement. “Are you gonna be leaving?”

Tony was hoping to ease into that particular landmine of discussion.

“I’m gonna be applying to a number of jobs,” he starts, “some of which are not in the city, so it’s up in the air.” Peter looks like he’s not buying it.

“I mean, yes, probably, I will be leaving,” he hedges, then to forestall any more tears as Peter’s cloud of sadness threatens to swallow them both whole, “but it’s not as though I’ll be out of touch! I’m like the plague, kiddo. Plus I’ll still have my aquarium design board email, and I’ll definitely still post on the forum there and all.”

“I do not understand your priorities, like, at all,” Peter mutters.

“My priorities are fine, kid, wait until you’re my age to judge me and my fishkeeping lifestyle. ”

“I thought the fish were a cover for your scrapbooks about your crush.” Peter dodges a beleaguered swat from Tony with ease.

“Oh, and my phone number will change, but I can text you the new one whenever I get it,”

“Who says I want your new number, old man?” Tony is too hampered by his garbage fort to reach him for another attempt. “Maybe I’ll take up a new hobby now that I can’t superhero, like petty vandalism or hashtag The Drugs.”

“There’s the Patented Parker Sass, oh how we’ve missed you,” Tony replies, “Good thing your Aunt May is at your place cooking us food and not hearing your plans for a crime-ridden hashtag future.” He makes quotes when he says hashtag for good measure, to annoy Pete further.

“Wait, what?”

“Like May was—She kept making finger quotes when she spoke,” Tony explains. “She is a gem.”

“No, I know, I meant the part where you’re coming to dinner.”

“We have to head there after I’m done wrapping up my belongings—”

“Wait, in _trash bags_? Are you throwing everything out? Like, _everything_? You _are_ leaving! Can I keep some stuff?”

Tony steamrollers right over that whirlwind of emotion to finish his thought, as he’s attempting waterworks prevention, here.

“—because I am not to be trusted in a food-based setting and do not recognize basic cooking utensils, so she is staging a hostile takeover and preventing threat of scurvy.”

“Ok, stop with the finger quotes, oh my god. And I’ve seen you, like, beast an entire jar of lemon curd in a night, scurvy’s not a problem.”

“Your verb choice is as creative and incomprehensible as ever,” Tony notes.

“Can I though?” asks Peter, who has no respect for his elders anymore and is clearly all set for that life of crime. “I’m a teenager without a good source of affordable supplies since all the electronic stores are closing and being replaced by planned obsolescence and user-restricted nanotech.”

“R.I.P. RadioShack, you beautiful bastard,” Tony says, fully aware he is being manipulated with his own prior rants about the state of technology. But he’s going to start being a responsible adult from here on out, as he moves forward in life. Also hypothetical cyclops are watching, and will probably notice if a certain spider takes scraps home to tinker.

“But I gotta draw the line in the sand, Pete. You just were released from a high-security government spook facility! You need to find another way to get your hero on, kid, if you plan to keep doing it.”

Peter’s young and impressionable face reads like a book where the lesson being inscribed is Don’t Get Caught. Which is not even in the vicinity of what Tony’s aiming for. He tries another tack.

“Look, if this stuff was valuable, I’d be taking it, or saving it. I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t need this junk. Neither do you. Honestly, truly, I mean this: you have what you need already to build new stuff.” He reaches out and taps Peter’s head lightly. “Better stuff, cause it’s your own.”

“I’m not a genius like you, though! I’m not the guy who built a makeshift heart valve out of scraps in the freakin’ desert. And then put it in his own body!”

Tony regrets not wearing a shirt 24/7, forever and ever. He’s never told Peter the extent of getting held hostage with his crew, watching the so-called retrieval fail, and getting out alone and injured, so Peter must have researched it.

He hopes the videos weren’t made public. He hopes if they were, that Peter showed some self-restraint. He’s never asked about why on earth Tony would have an aquarium, after all of that, so maybe it’s ok.

“Yeah, let’s not call it genius, that last part,” he says. “But you’ve got ideas I would never in a million years have thought of, like the reactive eye shape, and the spinneret reinforcements. I just have the knowledge of how to translate that into physical engineering from years of doing it in a harsh test field, and that’s knowledge that you can access so easily these days, and see how others did it before you. You’re already brilliant, you just need to not give up.”

Peter looks like he’s not tipped all the way over into convinced, so Tony tries one last Hail Mary. It’s dumb, but it’s what he’s got left to impart before he gives up being Yoda to this guy.

“Plus, in addition to being young and rife with all that neuroplasticity in your brain, you’ve got something else, way more than I do, going for you.”

Tony taps Peter’s sternum through his borrowed hoodie.

“Kiddo, you’re all heart. Way more than I think you should be, most of the time. You’ve got the thing that makes Cap, and Iron Man, and the Wasp, all of the Avengers, who they are. You want to make the world better, with your own two hands, right here and now, fuck the rules that say you can’t. You know you can. You’re known in at least two boroughs as being able to, right?”

“So why do you need a bag of garbage? It’s not what’s between you and doing the right thing. You got this already, way more than me. You don’t need the suit, Pete. You’re the real deal without it. You’re gonna be fine.”

“This has been the corniest pep talk you’ve ever given me,” says Peter, watery-eyed.

“No, I’ve definitely said way cornier things, give me some credit here, c’mon. I compared us to Marty McFly and Doc Brown, that one time. I can do a terrible impression of ‘these are not the droids’, this is mediocre corn content at best.”

“His best friend who, coincidentally, is a disgraced nuclear physicist,” Peter says to Tony's amusement, “Seems legit.” But then he exhales, like a weight on his chest is less cumbersome now. Tony mentally fist-pumps in victory.

“Ok, moving on. You need to get the sewing machine back to Mrs. Czebucznaja.”

“I will be mobbed by her kajillion tiny dogs and die in there as their chew toy, and Mrs. C won't notice for a year.”

“And then you need to help me dismantle the filtration system in the ceiling, since you can stick there with no hands.”

“My ghost will try his best, Mr. J.”

“And destroy my Iron Man media collection because there’s no way to explain that rationally to anyone, ever, and since you already know about it, you can be my partner in crime.”

Peter looks over the apartment thoughtfully while Tony prepares to bag his futon.

“Well, can I keep your fish tank and the fish that are left?”

Tony laughs. He just loses it to laughing, propped against uncomfortable bags of metal and who knows what else. Peter looks torn between joining him and calling an ambulance. Finally, Tony gets up and claps his shoulders.

“If you can figure out a way to get it to your apartment, and then convince your Aunt that this monstrosity is a good idea without blaming me? Sure, it’s all yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. it’s been a year? Since I started this fic, and since I started my current job. In this time i’ve travelled to places i wouldn’t have been able to go to otherwise, learned a shit ton about myself and (job information redacted), gotten notification that a 13 page comic I drew & submitted five years ago is gonna be published in an anthology (HOLY CRAP, also deets on my tumblr if you’re interested), dislocated some new joints (sarcastic yay), and haven’t had a single relapse. I write because I need to have an outlet for me, regardless of readership (don’t ask about the poetry lol), and to work through my own issues, but I’m not gonna pretend like seeing excitement from other people doesn’t give me a kick. I’m so awed that 100+ people have clicked the lil kudos button and some of them even said wassup. Y’all, it’s been fun, and I hope in the coming year(s) of me writing and drawing and (job information redacted) I keep having as much of a blast as I have in this one. 
> 
> To celebrate, at the end of this particular fic, if you can name three (3) non-stated references/easter eggs (ie all the movie references this chapter are super obvious, and mostly named and therefore disqualified but there's a reference to something else which would count) I’ve made in various ways, ie to another piece of media, or culture, or even another fanfic, I’ll write a timestamp or other prompt for you as a lil gift, or doodle a scene you like from it, your choices. I do have rough drawings of chapter illustrations but those’ll take a while to get in shape. 
> 
> Can’t say thanks enough, I’m feeling like a lucky guy. -Sid


	16. in which there are more action sequences and Captain America comes to a conclusion while most likely costing the city of New York several thousand dollars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim has things to do, places to be, except when he gets told to do those things and go to the places. 
> 
> He continues to be cranky, only now his team has noticed, and appears to care. Well, most of them. Hawkeye probably not so much.
> 
> (Also, what's up with these fake Doom Bots?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back, my good bitches! 
> 
> Holiday retail is still KICKING MY ASS, and I'm a Plague Vector at present, but here's a Hanukah gift, just for you. 
> 
> Jim is still not on the right track.

A Fake Doombot nearly clips him, but Jim fires off a blast that puts an end to that.

As the flaming pieces plummet downwards, he follows up with a traction lock to curtail them into a group and cushion the impact to prevent any shrapnel. He only has a split second to duck as Falcon swoops by, kicking another ‘bot in the stomach as it comes up behind him. Jim didn’t even see it.

“Have Witch do that kinda damage control, man, just keep blasting these guys,” he hears over the comms. He grits his teeth and nails another impostor bot in response to Falcon’s aside.

“Belay that,” comes Cap’s voice, cutting in, “Iron Man, you’re needed by the leftmost building here to play some very urgent catch.”

“He means catching human civilians,” Hawkeye patches in, as if that wasn’t already apparent from the heat signatures Jim’s getting in the corner of his HUD view. “Just so you know.”

“Yeah, I got that, thanks.”

“Hey, you nearly got run up there by those last two, I’m just trying to relay info here.”

“Cut the chatter, Hawk. I need you to be on top of these bots with me, Falcon and Iron Man getting this whole area free of people, Witch on sweep for the collateral.”

“Can we get Thor back? He’d be the best at keeping these metal fucks corralled with his wind mojo,” Barton practically whines over the comms as Rhodes manages to traction lock an errant bus of terrified tourists mid-flight.

“No,” says Cap’s voice, tinged with static. Jim snorts inelegantly.

“I think they’ve gotten way more amped up this time, “ he says, reorienting. He sets his screaming cargo down shaken but not stirred on an undisturbed patch of side street several blocks away. He might have to make a press tour apology again in Taiwan if the swears he hears are what he thinks they are.

“No shit,” says Falcon’s line, as he catches a woman in free fall from the decimated building, but Jim keeps talking as he flies back over to see if there’s any more coming down.

“They’ve been relatively easy to defeat by whatever means we were using, but now they’re only going down from direct cortex or plexus hits, even though the frame is the same thing it always was.” Jim’s display orients at his quick input, scanning a nearby bot before he blasts it, and checking it against the lab results from last time. Thank god Pepper’s got the database up and primed for him to access, she’s as amazing as always.

“Cortex? Plexus?” the Scarlet Witch patches in, sounding confused.

Jim is too distracted by the results to follow up—it’s basically the same materials and configuration, but the black box is different, can he compare those instead?

“Head and chest,” Hawkeye fills her in. “They only explode if we hit those now.”

“Wasp would be perfect for that, she was to me saying the neck has a lot of openings,” she replies. “Plus she wanted to try dragging them around from inside to hit one another.”

There’s the buzz of Falcon and Cap opening a separate line to talk one to one, meaning that they’re most likely about to do something to give Jim a heart attack. The team can patch into it, but no one wants to hear two grown men flirting like they’re being graded on finesse and ability to change register while trying to ask a tactical question.

Falcon knows everyone in the history of eyesight wants to fuck him, and Cap’s too goddamn smug about being an Adonis literally chiseled out of a five-pound bag of fuck you.

It’s not conducive to getting a bead on the level of ammo they have left, is all Jim’s saying here. He idly wonders if they do this on purpose. Probably.

And yes, they are now using the shield like the world’s most expensive frisbee slash boomerang to wrap up the noodles of power lines downed by bot activity. Falcon keeps flicking it with his flight wings for enough torque to send it back to Cap, or maybe keeping his hands out of the path of the current. Jim is gonna kill them later, he is not replacing the struts on Falcon’s suit again if they get sliced again.

Let alone melted by electrical contact with the NYC powergrid.

He needs to focus. Black box data is a no, because he’d delegated it to Tony in favor of focusing on the materials and definitely not on flirting. So it’ll be hanging around in needlessly complicated server space in the sub labs instead of at his fingertips.

He tallies the bots around to see where he needs to keep an eye on. The remainder are still up high, and getting picked off by well-placed arrows. He switches his display back to heat signatures and the suit mainframe.

If that data is actually even in the sub labs, or even finished, since apparently Tony builds weapons for children in his goddamn spare time instead of doing the work that Jim specifically told him was urgent. And since apparently Tony has offsite resources, since RLI didn’t ping anything amiss. Even in the fucking wet dream of a playground Jim built him as a sentimental thank you present, one that’s feeling more like a slap in the face right now.

Oh yeah, there’s all the anger and betrayal he’s been repressing so as to not destroy every interpersonal relationship around him. It’s also not where he asked it to be today. How about that, Jim thinks acidly.

“She said that to you? Huh. Sounds kinda fun,” Hawkeye’s line is saying. Jim tries to pick up the thread of the discussion, but he’s forgotten what inane shit they were talking about.

“Hey, we could use that to test if there’s any lag time in the remote control of these dumb things, see if we can figure out how to deactivate them, since Rhodes is taking so damn long.” Jim flips him off in lieu of responding because that’s pretty much the level of self control he’s got left, and checks for any more actual people in the combat area before he goes to express his emotions with gratuitous anti-Doom-bot violence like a healthy, well-adjusted adult man.

Hawkeye predictably sees the gesture and laughs in response, until he’s cut off by Captain America patching back in to the main comm line to reassess.

“Looks like we’re almost in the clean up phase now, so Falcon’s going to be trying to get the rest of these suckers to Hawkeye to finish ‘em off. I’m going to recon with Iron Man for a minute, get a plan together to secure the area. Witch, take a breather if you need.”

The Scarlet Witch patches in her coordinates as she heads off to take shelter in a deserted storefront. Falcon and Barton’s lines buzz for their own one-on-one, which is not Jim’s problem any more. Cap jumps up on an overturned car to beckon Jim over.

He flies down to alight nearby and pops his helmet.

“Rhodes, what’s going on? You nearly got clipped up there, you’re not giving me regular point of contact—”

This is not what Jim needs right now. He can take the earnest ribbing from Hawkeye, the tough-love got-your-six from Falcon, but he does not have the time for Cap’s brusque check-in. He has a job to do, and he’s going to do it.

His face must show how not up for this he is, because Steve Rogers squints at him, then throws up his gloved hands.

“You know what, Jim? I don’t want to know. I’m benching you for the moment, and taking you off the advance roster until you get whatever it is you got going on sorted.”

“ _What_? You think you got the authority here, to pull that kind of a—”

“Get your shit sorted on your own time, Rhodes, not in the middle of the fight.”

Jim sends his visor cascading over his face again, so he can use a secure one to one channel to continue this. Cap visibly restrains an eye roll at this, but Jim is going to be charitable and ignore that.

“You don’t know about Fury’s rendevous with me? This isn’t just my shit to sort.” He tries to rein in the pissiness in his voice.

“Yeah, I heard,” says Cap, indicating that Jim failed on that last count there, “and I’m not talking about the latest attempt at Nazi fuckery or your breach in protocol, part one thousand and eight. I’m talking about whatever has you out of the action in your head.”

Jim resolutely does not think about Pepper, accusing him of being in love with an employee who broke his trust. And potentially worse than that.

“We can make nice about this later, but right now? You look like you got somewhere else to be, so get there and get it sorted. We can handle this here and now, and we’ve got other people we can pull to cover you.”

“You think I’m not pulling my weight, here?” Jim will turn this fight around, so help him sweet Lord.

Cap’s A-line posture gets somehow even more solid and unmoving.

“I think you have a lot going on that I’m not gonna ask about because I frankly _don’t give a shit_ , and I think you have difficulty saying no when that call comes up that we’re assembling. So I’m telling you that I’m redistributing that weight on your behalf, and giving you an out so you don’t come over all verklempt at letting the team down, or what the fuck ever you’re thinking.”

“You’re one to talk,” Jim replies. “When was your last time on the bench, huh? You’re like the king of I Can Do This All Day.”

“I know I am, that’s why I’m defending my fucking title from pretenders like your sorry tin can ass. I’m the king of this hill and that makes me the most qualified to advise you.”

“I technically outrank you, you know that, right?” Jim grumbles, as the channel buzzes back open with one of their team member’s request. Cap does roll his eyes at that, which he’s never done at Carol when she’s pulled this shit.

“Get mad at me all you want, Shellhead, just do it later.”

“Ooh, are Mom and Dad fighting?” Jim hears Hawkeye ask, with fake concern.

“Iron Man, don’t be a dick, pulling rank on my boy Rogers like that,” says Falcon’s voice.

“Fuck every single one of you, I’m going home, as per request,” says Jim.

“Please do,” Cap mutters.

“Are we calling in anyone?” Scarlet Witch’s accented voice says; Jim can hear the judgment upon them all in her tone. “I think we’re holding steady as is.”

“We’re good. Let me know when you’re regrouped enough to get back into it. Not you, Iron Man.”

Jim goes to fly off, but now Falcon’s opening a direct line to him, because this is just how it is now. As he gains altitude, leaving Cap to his self-appointed throne, he watches Falcon take another group of bots out.

“Rhodes, I’m the one who asked him to bench you. Get pissed at me, not him.”

“I’m not pissed, I’m apparently _verklempt_.”

“Uh-huh. Look, I wanna talk to you later.”

“Are we not talking right now?”

“You know something? Get outta here, I’m not giving you a head’s up anymore, I’m just gonna corner you and you’re gonna have to deal with it.”

Jim knows, he does in fact realize, that his teammates, and Fury, and Pepper, are all trying to take care of him in their own way. He knows he’s not on top of his game, he knows more or less why. He just wishes he’d get some damn agency in attempting to get back up there.

And he’s not getting anywhere dwelling on Tony at 14 thousand feet. He’s gotta be grounded, and keeping the clouds out of his eyes about this.

“I’ll hold you to that, I guess,” he says, and if Falcon has any response, Jim doesn’t hear it because he disconnects the communication line, and flies back to his number one at RLI to get his second-favorite employee out of his system, once and for all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, so tumblr went frigging bonkers while I wasn't paying attention? Mayyyy have to find new image hosting platforms cause yeahhhh no. Any suggestions? 
> 
> I kinda feel like this is a filler chapter for me to get from point A to B via route C, but hopefully it's still quality and y'all find it funny enough. Plus Cap and Falcon get to do their thing! Always a plus.
> 
> Also I want there to be less fight scenes. More talking, preferably only two people in an isolated environment. The ideal, right there.
> 
> Next Chapter is a Nat chapter, because I think it's been too long. Also hopefully will be posted relatively soon, SORRY I WAS SUPER DEAD FOR LIKE MONTHS AT A TIME I HAD A FLARE UP AND ALSO SCREW PEOPLE WHO [Job Information Redacted] WHEN I'M [Job Information Redacted]!


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